“The bayou certainly has a wild beauty of its own, although it is undoubtedly hostile to man,” Richard Duvall mused. “But then, many things that are quite beautiful are hostile to man.” “Like women?” Shiloh suggested.”

“To many women mistake a man's hostility for wit and his silence for depth.”

“Powerful women always interpret hostility as unrequited love.”

“Underneath the quarrels,the misunderstandings, the apparent hostility of everyday life, a real and true affection can exist. Married life, I mused, as I went to bed,was a curious thing.”

“The playboy is not necessarily a man who has many girlfriends, or a man who has many women, or a man who has slept with many women. That is old. But there is a new breed of the playboy and he is the man who remains single in attempts to make every woman feel as if he belongs to her, he remains a virgin in order to make every woman feel like she will be the first one, and in the end he may choose a very unattractive woman to adorn his side, so that in all circumstances, he will shine as the more beautiful one. This is the new breed of playboy. And it is a very evil one.”

“To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood.”