“He saw something more in those eyes. The emotion wasn't nakedly apparent, but Mr. Cawley was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnat...”

“At Yale, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he'd grown up in Newark. In Newark, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained fr...”

“...he wondered how a person as bright and deserving as Rob Peace could have made the choices, beginning on the night of that banquet, that had resulted in this. And he figured that the choices hadn...”

“The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm p...”

“He was known to hit low, drive upward from the hips, and flip other boys over his shoulder and onto their backs, knocking the wind out of them on the glass-littered asphalt, sometimes causing a fum...”

“In East Orange, initiations were completed by murdering someone, for no other reason than to prove to a tremendously cold, tremendously tight brotherhood that you possessed the hardness required to...”

“[W]hen it's slow, they send you home, and when it's busy, they expect you to stay late. They also expect you to be able to come in to cover someone's shift if a co-worker gets sick at the last minu...”

“Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to p...”

“A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.”

“Is there shame in living off your fellow man or being unable to take care ofyourself? You bet. But a person whos willing to work and pay their own waycan at least take pride in that even if they ca...”

“A true encounter with the living God will break the spirit of religiosity, empty man of his pride and conform even the most vile and wicked into a living vessel for His glory.”

“He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a t...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”