“Here were these men from the town, having eaten and drunk, standing beside him whose children were starving and eating the very earth of the fields; here they were, come to squeeze his land from him in his extremity.”
“The philosophy of the rich and the poor is this: the rich invest their money and spend what is left. The poor spend their money and invest what is left.”
“People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they are ruined by wealth as well because they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum.”
“The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns”sets in.”
“And by the time he met Big Mike, he had a new unofficial title: Life Guidance Counselor to whatever black athlete stumbled into the Briarcrest Christian School. The black kids reminded him, in a funny way, of himself. Sean knew what it meant to be the poor kid in a private school, because he’d been one himself.”
“In the paved city it was Christmas time. There were red and green electric lights strung crisscrossed everywhere, and all turned on in the daytime. Old Phoenix would have been lost if she had not distrusted her eyesight and depended on her feet to know where to take her.”
“The plague killed so many, Comfort, labor was scarce, good fields were left untilled. Poor folk like us began to know our worth and ask for better wages. That angered King Edward, our king’s grandfather. When the strong grow angry, Comfort, the weak will suffer.”
“I told Ma once the Howards had a room just for company, a room just for books, and a room just for plants, and she said that was three rooms too many. First time I ever saw any envy in my ma.”