“Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears...”

“Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you...”

“Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French an...”

“People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.”

“Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff - tell them of his dif...”

“In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.”

“...this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.”

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed.”

“Sky, wait. The way his voice wraps around my name makes me wish the only word in his entire vocabulary way Sky.”

“I'm not going to do it again," Lena Marquez whispered to the red purse across the hall from her nestle of blankets. "Never again.”