Wayfaring Stranger

The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.

You’ve got another problem. Like most white trash, you’re disrespectful to your betters and proud of your stupidity and ignorance.

As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else.

It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.

There's another way to put it. Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.

of the story showed the four brain-destroyed women Linda Gail had shown me. The grainy transfer of the images to newsprint had made them even more macabre. The story had come off the wire in Los Angeles and was written by a gossip columnist who quoted other gossip columnists as the story’s source. The details were bizarre and prurient and unbelievable, in the way of stories from True Detective, Argosy, Saga, and Male, and because they were so unbelievable, the reader concluded they could not have been manufactured. I saw Roy’s name and Linda Gail’s and the director Jerry Fallon’s and Clara Wiseheart’s. The story was basically accurate; the prose was another matter. It was purple, full of erotic suggestion, cutesy about “love nests” and “romance in Mayheco.” But as tabloid reporting often does for no purpose other than to satisfy a lascivious readership, the article brought to light an injustice and criminal conspiracy that mainstream newspaper and radio would not have touched. In other words, the account was less one of fact than a hazy description of infidelity, a movie set that had turned into the Baths of Caracalla, a young starlet seduced by

There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason.

Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption.

He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom.

There are those who are made different in the womb.

Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.

Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it’s the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we’re actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not.

The Homeric Epic does not have to be discovered inside a book; it begins just west of Fort Worth and extends all the way to Santa Monica." Wayfaring Stranger Pg. 415

Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.

You don’t realize the gift you have.

Wicked men do not go away of their own accord.

He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes, and motorized vehicle and telephones wires, and radios that surrounded him now....... The woods in late autumn had become his private sun dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church.

We’re wayfaring strangers. We’re born alone, we die alone.

It's fair to say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable.

Be your own man, even if you don’t add up to much.

As flawed as Southern culture is, mendacity has always been treated in the South as a despicable characteristic. Notice how often Southerners casually address others as “you son of a bitch” with no insult intended. When the same person calls someone a “lying son of a bitch,” you know he’s serious.

I’ve killed men against whom I had no grievance.

If people stick together, they can always make do.