Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em.