Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.

People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.