Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?

A gentleman can live through anything.

...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.