“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

“I mean this: every time I come home, I feel like I'm coming back to the world, and when I leave Macomb it's like leaving the world.”

“Something is wrong with me, it's something about me. it has to be me because all those people cannot have changed.”

“He was letting you break your icons one by one. he was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.”

“I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the diff...”

“The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they can't scare us with the essential inferiority line, they'll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that's the only thing they know is feared in ...”

“Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101.”

“The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.”

“And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.”

“The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.”

“Trees down south have a difference to them, a subtle, slinking movement, mile by mile- a gracefulness, a swagger. Lanky trees stretching out their wiry thin, Spanish moss-covered branches, moss tha...”