He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.

It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.