It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

Kill the women? No – nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave, and you’re always as polite as pie to them; and by-and-by they fall in love with you and never want to go home any more.

You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand.

You can't pray a lie--I found that out.

Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward.

I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.

If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once – you’ll see.

Hatred is unattractive, but it's also irresistible. If men were honest with themselves, they'd admit it's a stronger passion than lust.

That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.

It inspired a kind of Huck Finn moment when I decided it was better to risk hell than shrivel in the midst of a toxic Southern Baptist morality.

Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.

To ennoble is to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom.

It was a dreadful thing to see. Humans beings can be awful cruel to one another.

It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.

You gwyne to have considerable trouble in yo' life, en considerable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you's gwyne to git well agin.

Talking of appearances, I would like my future readers to know that the picture of Jim and me that Thomas Hart Benton painted on the wall of the Missouri state capitol bears not the slightest resemblance to either one of us. ... I've never been satisfied with any representation of myself and have seen only one picture of Jim that did him justice. I don't know why this should be, unless it is evidence of a nearly universal prejudice against us, instigated by Sunday school superintendents, Republicans, and bigots.

I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take -- unknown to me -- its instructions from a mastermind.