We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license - until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall.

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.

Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.