“...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.”

“For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal's own hand and every man is suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.”

“Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?”

“The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name…which belongs to that non-existent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger.”

“He had had a beautiful and eager young wife and another man had taken her away from him and had fathered his child, and all he had done was to walk away, leaving her in possession of everything he owned, and crawl into a hole in the slums and lie there like a wounded animal and let his intellect bleed away into pious drivel and his strength bleed away into weakness. And he had been good. But his goodness had told me nothing except that I could not live by it. My new father, however, had not been good. He had cuckolded a friend, betrayed a wife, taken a bride, driven a man, though unwittingly, to death. But he had done good.”

“Willie went out and buttonholed folks on the street and tried to explain things to them. You could see Willie standing on a street corner, sweating through his seersucker suit, with his hair down in his eyes, holding an old envelope in one hand and a pencil in the other, working out figures to explain what he was squawking about, but folks don't listen to you when your voice is low and patient and you stop them in the hot sun and make them do arithmetic.”

“They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do which is what you are only has meaning in relation to other people. ”