On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.

As I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time are those who have given me something to say.

It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter.

I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?

We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.

I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.