The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it.
The sparrow still falls.
What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other fai...
The trick is not to care. I have a perfect indifference to winning.
The world is filled with unreasonable hate. What's wrong with unreasonable love?
There are a thousand ways for a boy of fifteen to go wrong. The most gently reared will lash out, battered by gusts of mindless fury. The brightest can be swamped by black despair. The sweetest may tu...
There is simply no alternative. We have to know them.
There was a real sweetness to that man: a special sort of gentleness that you see sometimes in people who've been hurt bad but don't want revenge. [Bessie about James]
What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.
There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove himself from some part of the universe, so something besid...
They all knew it was gallows humor. There would be babies born to thirteen-year-olds who would show up at the clinic with stomachaches. Backs and shoulders wrenched, wrists damaged, knees torn at the...
They spoke then, with the dear and ordinary intimacy of the well-married in the eye of a storm. [369]
They strolled toward town, stopping now and then to let him catch his breath and to gaze upward, for the west Kansas sky is black velvet on clear, cool December nights, and the Milky Way is strung acr...
They were beaten [bullies]. Ninety-nine out of a hundred still are, inside. A man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Mostly, it works...That's why a bully...
To Robert, he wrote, In Texas, rocks are considered inadequate weaponry during school yard scuffles. Dallas children carry a brace of loaded pistols, a concealed Deringer, and a six-inch toadsticker i...
To leave the apple unpicked—that was sin.
Tradition was safety; change was danger.
Until you get the measure of your own soul, Jim, don't be quick to condemn a priest, or anyone else for that matter. I'm not scolding you, sweetheart, she said hurriedly. It's just that, until you've...
There are still times when the thief I started out to be feels more authentic to me than the priest I’ve been for decades. To be pulled out of a slum and educated is to be an outsider forever— He stop...
Wyatt, I’m from Chicago, Eddie told him. Let me explain politics to you.
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