“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 Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.”

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

“Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.”

“Immer wieder behauptete Unwahrheiten werden nicht zu Wahrheiten, sondern, was schlimmer ist, zu Gewohnheiten.”