And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

She was the captain of her soul

All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

I give it (grandfather's watch) to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

next year she would have another birthday, and if she just remembered to get into bed left foot first and to turn the pillow over before she went to sleep, who knows what might happen?

that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgement and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realizing that actually you cannot, that actually it is the stronger.

The destiny of the land, the nation, the South, the State, the County, was already whirling into the plunge of its precipice, not that the State and the South knew it, because the first seconds of fall always seem like soar.

There are good men everywhere, at all times. Most men are. Some are just unlucky, because most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I've known some that even the circumstances couldn't stop. ~from 'Delta Autumn

Behind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable though massive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of the moment.

Which explains a lot, having likewise noticed in my time that the goddess in charge of virtue seems to be the same one in charge of luck, if not of folly also.