Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...

Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you

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

Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.

When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.

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