It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.