“You can’t make a race horse of a pig.”
“No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”

“It is easy to find a logical and virtuous reason for not doing what you don’t want to do.”

“The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.”

Samuel wrote to Joe, sayings, “I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you’d take a cookie on a full stomach. But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother. Your last letter only made her think you are not well. Your mother does not believe there are many ills uncurable by good strong soup. She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache. It worries her. Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven’t even got a shovel yet.”

“A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”

“She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.”

“Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn’t in time.”

“Is it responsibility or blame that bothers you?”
“I don’t want blame.”
“Sometimes responsibility is worse. It doesn’t carry any pleasant egotism.”
“I was thinking about that time when Sam Hamilton and you and I had a long discussion about a word,” said Adam. “What was that word?”
“Now I see. The word was timshel.”
“Timshel-and you said-“
“I said that word carried a man’s greatness if he wanted to take advantage of it.”
“I remember Sam Hamilton felt good about it.”
“It set him free,” said Lee. “It gave him the right ot be a man, seperate from every other man.”
“That’s lonely.”
“All great and precious things are lonely.”

“By whipping himself he protected himself against whipping by someone else.”

“Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface.”

“Do you know that I paid two dollars for Doxology [Sam Hamilton’s horse] thirty-three years ago? Everything was wrong with him, hoofs like flapjacks, a hock so thick and short and straight there seems no joint at all. he’s hammerheaded and swaybacked. He has a pinched chest and a big behind. He has an iron mouth and he still fights the upper. with a saddle he feels as thought you were riding a sled over a gravel pit. He can’t trot and he stumbles over his feet when he walks. I have never in thirty-three years fond one good thing about him. He even has an ugly disposition. He is selfish and quarrelsome and mean and disobedient. to this day I don’t dare walk behind him because he will surely take a kick at me. when I feed him mush he tries to bite my hand. And I love him.”

“I think perhaps Liza accepted the world as she accepted the Bible, with all of its paradoxes. She did not like death and paradox but she knew they existed, and when it came it did not surprise her.
Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, hut he did not really believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, was immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he had always thought he could argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick.
To Liza it was simply death—the thing promised and expected. She could go on and in her sorrow put a pot of beans in the oven, bake six pies, and plan to exactness how much food would be necessary properly to feed the funeral guests. And she could in her sorrow see that Samuel had a clean white shirt and that his black broadcloth was brushed and free of spots and his shoes blacked. Perhaps it takes these two kinds to make a good marriage, riveted with several kinds of strengths.”

“Show me the man who isn’t interested in discussing himself.”

Adam Trask to Cathy: “You know about the ugliness in people. You showed me the pictures. You use all the sad, weak parts of a man, and God knows he has them. …But you -yes, that’s right – you don’t know about the rest. You don’t believe I brought you the letter because I don’t want your money. You don’t believe I love you. And the men who come to you here with their ugliness, the men in the pictures – you don’t believe those men could have goodness and beauty in them. You see only one side, and you think – more than that, you’re sure – that’s all there is.’ …It seems that there’s a part of you missing. Some men can’t see the color green, but they may never know they can’t. I think you are only part of a human. I can’t do anything about that. I wonder whether you ever feel that something invisible is all around you. It would be horrible if you knew it was there and couldn’t see or feel it. That would be horrible.”