He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
People’s just people as far as I'm concerned.
It is a sentimental error [. . .] to believe that the past is dead.
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
Furthermore, I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear.
They hated him, and this hatred was blacker than their hearts, blacker than their skins, redder than their blood, and harder, by far, than his club.
One of the reasons people cling to hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.
At that moment Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him. He felt that his father had carried him through a mighty test, had revealed to him a great secret which would be the key to his life forever.
He felt that he was traveling up a savage, jungle river, looking for the source which remained hidden just beyond the black, dripping foliage.