Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.