The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

His mother and father, who went to church on Sundays, they did it too, and sometimes John heard them in the bedroom behind him, over the sound of rats' feet, and rat screams, and the music and cursing from the harlots house downstairs.

He saw, in this wandering, how far his people had wandered from God. They had all turned aside, and gone out into the wilderness, to fall down before idols of gold and silver, and wood and stone, false gods that could not heal them.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arched before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody; in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.