Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left...They were everything. Everything was there, in them...Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.

A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.

I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.