A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

A big iron needle stitching the country together.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Groan and forget it.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.