“I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.”

“To ennoble is to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom.”

“Talking of appearances, I would like my future readers to know that the picture of Jim and me that Thomas Hart Benton painted on the wall of the Missouri state capitol bears not the slightest resem...”

“I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take -- unknown to me -- its instructions from a mastermind.”

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“Hate the sin, love the sinner.”

“The opposite of love is not hate, its apathy, when you simply don't bother about that person!”

“Kill the women? No nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave, and youre always as polite as pie to them; and by-and-by they fall in love with you and never want t...”

“You can't pray a lie--I found that out.”

“If you think it aint dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once youll see.”

“A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.”

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”

“[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.”