Light in August Quotes

There is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that can’t deny the bill when it comes around. They can’t deny it, like the honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that’s why don’t anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good can’t.

What makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.

Poor man. Poor mankind.

People everywhere are about the same, but that it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people’s names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.

Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.

Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.

Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.