“Husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what marriage meant. It was just so. Janie felt glad of the thought, for then it wouldn't seem so destructive and mouldy. She wouldn't be lonely anymore.”

“All of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innovations of tone and tempo were conceivable. Then they hushed and ate barbecue.”

“Now, women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

“Let the sun go down on you like King Harold at the battle of Hastings — fighting gloriously. Maybe a loser but what a loser! Greater in defeat than the conqueror. Certainly not a coward that rusted out lurking in his tent.”

“So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

“They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged.”

“The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay. You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity. Gods must keep their distances from men.”

“The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.”

“It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.”

“Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.”

“So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.”