“He had a face like a nutcracker; a scrawny man of no particular age, with merry secretive eyes.”

“I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.”

“Sometimes I ain’t sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain't. Sometimes I think it ain't none of us pure crazy and ain't none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it. […] That’s how I reckon a man is crazy. That’s how he can’t see eye to eye with other folks. And I reckon they ain't nothing else to do with him but what the most folks says is right.”

“A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.”

“He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad.”

“He was as calm as a god who has seen both life and death, and seen nothing of particular importance in either of them.”

“...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.”