Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.

Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.

A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.