And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.

It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream" "I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up" "Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-" "Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have advantages." "You'd find them everywhere, if you ever bothered to look!

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.