Life hath quicksands, Life hath snares!
This is a boy's lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime - he never knows. And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable.
One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations for every natural act.
Christmas day is the children's, but the holidays are youth's dancing-time.
Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them.
Men were just like sheep, and nothing was easier than for women to set up as shepherds and pen them up in a field.
Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth.
You can't pray away the gay, but you can torture a conflicted closet-case to death.
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
I cracked a child prostitution ring - I'd worked with three vice cops every day for months, out on the street, in the cold, trying to track down the pervs and the young girls being prostituted. We finally got the convictions. Six or seven months later, I was working, and I glanced up at the TV, and it was a report on a federal case. It was all three of them, in federal court, in handcuffs. Every time they busted a drug lord or a doper, they'd take all their money and their jewelry and flat screens before sending them to jail. They had been stealing from dopers for years!
As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.