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The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.

White: I long for Darkness. I pray for death, real death. And if I thought that in death I would meet the people I knew in life, I don't know what I would do. That would be the ultimate horror, the ultimate nightmare. If I thought I was gonna meet my mother again an' start all of that over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to... that would be the final nightmare. Goddamn Kafka on wheels.

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.

Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy.

You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such value.

He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong. (p.71)

I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.

You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.

The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said, I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one. (p.158)

Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone.

She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.