Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico

You men,' she says. 'You durn men.

Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.

...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

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.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.