“...Mom equated money with affection...but I never cared about the money. I just wanted her to be healthy.”

“But yeah, like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat.”

“A young man was sitting at home when a terrible rainstorm began. Within hours, the mans house began to flood, and someone came to his door offering a ride to higher ground. The man declined, saying...”

“To this day, being able to take advantage of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate. We rec...”

“For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated...We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is a constant exposure to the bear, whether...”

“There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It's hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don't need to make it even harder on each other.”

“If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.”

“I'll never get over the factthat the buildings all light up at night,and the night comes every nightand without regret we let it go.We sleep a little and we live.That's what we do.”

“We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful...”

“Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.”

“So the next day I asked Dan how is it that Bubba can get killed, and what kind of half assed nature law would allow that. He thought about it for a while, and said, 'Well, I'll tell you, Forrest, a...”

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”