I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.

I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. . . I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.

It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine--hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security.

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.