The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Will power meant nothing.

Pickett excused himself, watchful of Longstreet. Pickett was always saying something to irritate somebody, and he rarely knew why, so his method was simply to apologize in general from time to time and let people know he meant well and then to shove off and hope for the best. He apologized and departed, curls ajiggle.

If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.

Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.

There's nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.

Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.

Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not. But truth is it's all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I'm no stranger here. Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there's nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I'm at home everywhere. Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world.