I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination.

You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.

I wasn't aware of Ku Klux Klan as I was aware of the widespread assumption that African-Americans were dumber than white people. I think my father believed that. I think everybody white did.

Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.

Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?

Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.