Natchez Burning

You can't build happiness on someone else's pain.

The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them.

People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

Don’t keep a girl guessing too long, or she’ll find the answer somewhere else.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.   —Aristotle

The past is never dead. It's not even past; if it were there would be no grief or sorrow.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children, because they’re more certain they are their own.

Did the fact that Martin Luther King diddled all those women change what he did for his people? Or Franklin Roosevelt? General Eisenhower? Not one whit. Men are men, and gods are for storybooks. And if you’ve read your Edith Hamilton or Jane Harrison—or the Old Testament, for that matter—you’ll know that gods acted like men most of the time, or worse.

If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.

For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop.

to yearn for ignorance is to embrace the wishful thinking of a child. For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop.

A man's biggest enemy is his mouth.

The faith of children is an awesome thing to behold. If only we could all be worthy of it.

For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. —Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

But fear and danger aren’t always directly proportional. We’re all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.

Nothing frightens me more than the faith in my daughter’s eyes. How many men deserve that kind of trust? One by one, the mentors I’ve most admired eventually revealed chinks in their armor, cracks in their façades, and tired feet of clay—or worse.

Fate doesn’t let men choose their wars. Or even their battles, sometimes. But one resolute man can sometimes accomplish remarkable things against overwhelming odds.

superior numbers took their toll. Realizing that he and

Caitlin’s ambition is like a third person in the car.

For only with the deepest knowledge can one diagnose that most elusive of conditions: the truth.

Every son eventually learns his daddy has feet of clay. You just happen to have a father of singular rectitude, so it took until you were forty-five. That doesn’t make it any less painful.

Old Shelby said something interesting about facts: ‘People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what’s around them—light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep,

Comparing that shyster to a snake would be a slander to the serpent.

Albert didn't know how that skinny school teacher could take what Willie gave her. But that was another thing he'd learned over the years; the size of the woman on the outside didn't mean nothing. It was how much hunger she had on the inside that made her what she was between the sheets.

diffident voice. “You’re not going to believe this.