“Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora ...”
″‘You want to find out if you can really do the job,’ he explained. Like those guys in the books. They’d been tested and proven. It was another generation of Ranger’s turn now. Their turn.”
“The Intelligent Design proponents make a compelling, and totally legitimate, argument that if a theory has not been proven, then one suggested theory is just as good as another.”
“Where the really sincere white people have got to do their ‘proving’ of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is — and that’s in their own home communities.”
″‘We have to be more hardworking than other people,’ said Papa, ‘to prove that we’re not lazy, more generous to prove that we’re not mean, more polite to prove that we’re not rude.‘”
″‘The thing is,’ Mark went on, ‘was it just an accident, or did we want so much to be magic we got that way, somehow? The thing is, each of us ought to make a wish. That’ll prove it one way or the other.‘”