“I felt anger and fear and pain coming from him, but I didn’t back away, I stayed right there, and knew I had done the right thing when he buried his face in my neck and cried some more.”
″Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things?
You may have causes, goals, interests. Are they even worth pursuing?I’ve long held on to a clipping from a newspaper in Roanoke, Virginia.It featured a photo of a pregnant woman who had lodged a protest against a local construction site. She worried that the sound of jackhammers was injuring her unborn child. But get this: In the photo, the woman is holding a cigarette. If she cared about her unborn child,the time she spent railing against jackhammers would have been better spent putting out that cigarette.″
“I have not always done the right thing. When I was younger...I did worse things than Jack. Worse than any of them. I was the monster, then, Bod, and worse than any monster.”
“I see the Master as a man having terrible choices to make; whatever he chooses will do harm, but maybe if he does the right thing, a little less harm will come about than if he chooses wrong. God preserve me from having to make that sort of choice.”
″‘You would have thought more of me if I’d let that dog wander around till Judd found it again, kick the daylights out of ‘im?’ I ask.
‘I want you to do what’s right.’
‘What’s right?’
For once in my eleven years, I think I have my dad stumped.”
“All my life I’ve been doing things because other people said they were the right things to do. This time I’m going to do something because I say so —even if you and everyone else thinks I’m mad.”
“The older man thinks the most important thing is for a police officer to do the right thing. the younger thinks it’s more important to do things correctly.”
“Sid, there’s only one person in this town mean enough to do that, and that’s you. If you had been in Huck’s place you’d ‘a’ sneaked down the hill and never told anybody on the robbers. You can’t do any but mean things, and you can’t bear to see anybody praised for doing good ones. There—no thanks, as the widow says”