Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property.

It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.

Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.

There's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.