“We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your p...”

“Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which ...”

“The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone youd ever left behind riding on your shoulders.”

“You couldnt live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.”

“Hell, were all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, youre a goddamn legend.”

“Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“Ex-slaves, in large part, shared a different economic vision. They were "always on the move," searching for family, denying their labor to "dishonest or oppressive employers," and asserting their i...”

“White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermin...”

“But lets not forget the Jew. Anybody that gives even a just criticism of the Jew is instantly labeled anti-Semite. The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him. You can tell the...”