The Given Day

And he hated himself and hated her,too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.

Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there's another family and that's the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they're as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don't have to look out for you and they don't have to love you. They choose to.

What molds us is what maims us.

Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J.P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?...Gods don't think they can become men.

Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men

He was done with every lie he'd ever allowed himself to believe, every lie he'd ever lived, every lie.

It was one of those sneaky days in late winter where spring came along to get a lay of the land.

This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.

You‘ve always had a soft heart, son. You just hide it better than most." Danny shrugged. "Starting to hide it from myself, then, I guess." "Always the danger, that. Then one day, sure, you can‘t remember where you left all those pieces you tried so hard to hold on. Or why you work so hard at the holding.

Rumors or no, Thomas, if the men strike, we'll see fecal gravity at work like never before. Ain't a man in this room who won't be covered in shit.

On September 7th, after the Cubs dropped Game Three, the two teams boarded the Michigan Central together to embark on the twenty-seven hour trip, and Babe Ruth got drunk and started stealing hats.

But Curtis had come to the table with something they’d never expected, something they would have thought outmoded and out-lived in the modern age: a kind of fundamental righteousness that only the fundamental possessed. Unfettered by doubt, it achieved the appearance of moral intelligence and a resolute conscience. The terrible thing was how small it made you feel, how weaponless. How could you fight righteous rage if the only arms you bore were logic and sanity?

You can have two families in this life, Joe, the one you’re born to and the one you build.

Music”—he smiled his glorious smile and raised his index finger—“music speaks for the soul because words are too small.

Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their "Amens" and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he’d get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.

Craftsmanship, his Uncle Cornelius had once told him, was just a fancy word for what happened when labor met love.

he'd never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion on the egomaniacal heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they this weilded "power" barbarically so the world would not find them out

If a man was lucky, he was moving toward something his whole life.

He was just getting started. He was ready to bust wide open. He could feel it. Big things. Big things were coming. From him. From everywhere. That was the feeling he got lately, as if the whole world had been held in a stable, him included. But soon, soon it was going to bust out all over the place.

Not that Danny seemed intent on fucking it up, just that he was a man after all, and no one knew better than Luther himself how completely a man could step on his own dick when what he thought he wanted contradicted what he knew he needed. The

As they've always been. And they don't change just because you want them to.

need to confess anything to anyone. You go.” “And why would I go?

Had eyes Luther’d seen before in the white poor—spent his whole life eating rage in place of food. Developed a taste for it he wouldn’t lose no matter how regular he ate for the rest of his life.

Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there’s another family and that’s the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they’re as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don’t have to look out for you and they don’t have to love you. They choose to.

Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?” “No, sir.” “Gods don’t think they can become men.

Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there’s another family and that’s the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they’re as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don’t have to look out for you and they don’t have to love you. They choose to.” “So