“He couldn't drive the horror of cannibalism from his brain, just as he couldn't wholly suppress a simple observation that seemed to rebut their savagery: these were the nicest man-eating barbarians a lonely wanderer could ever hope to encounter.”

“One of them confessed to Paul that his tribe had heard stories about the fiercely cannibalistic ways of white men. Paul's first instinct was to laugh him off as a simpleminded fool. But the legend hadn't been conjured from thin air. When Paul tried to assure him that white men didn't eat black men, the man confronted him with a direct challenge: explain why they bought and sold Africans as if they were cattle, not human beings."Why do you come from nobody knows where, and carry off our men, and women, and children?" the man asked Paul. "Do you not fatten them in your far country and eat them?”

“If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.”

“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”

“...the conflicts made him an indecisive mediator - a man, as someone had once observed, who couldn't keep his feet out of the shit on either side because he couldn't get the fencepost out of his ass.”

“He was acting like the man he wanted to be, in hopes that he could become him. He would keep acting until he couldn't stand it anymore, and then he would be the man he was.”

“He couldn't understand how he was awarded medals and honors for clubbing and bayoneting people, and be called a barbarian for killing seals.”