In that moment, when watches and clocks misbehave and you feel a cold vapor wrap itself around your heart, you unconsciously draw a line at the bottom of a long column of numbers and come up with a sum. Perhaps it's one that fills you with contentment and endows you with a level of courage and an acceptance that you didn't know you possessed.Or maybe not.

I could only wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.

Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is.

Hackberry Holland's greatest fear was his fellow man's propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry's view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval.

Success, like fashion, is a fickle companion and can leave one in the wink of an eye.

The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.

I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.