You don't do anybody any favours by being less than you are.
The air smelled like Bayou Teche when it's spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in the cattails and the flooded cypress.
The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.
Nothing is more important than saving. . . the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.
They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That's what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear stream and not let nobody taint the water for you.
I told myself I did not have to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent moments that used to come aborning like a sulfurous match flaring off a thumbnail.
The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.
Whenever someone accuses someone of being a racist - which is rare, you have to admit, considering how much racism there is - there is an incredible outrage. I realized that we live in an environment that it seems to be worse to call someone a racist than to be one.
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
If I start talking about my own hopes, it'll take hours. The biggest hope is that there's not any more discrimination between men and women. That women could have equal rights. It's very painful when you see in your family that a brother can do anything he wants, but at the same age, you can't.
The whole point of life is learning to live with the consequences of the bad decision we've made.