The public library was more accommodating;.

Because I’m too old for tragedy. I like a nice happy ending too.

Our Director had a vision, Sheriff Swagger. He envisioned a scientific national police force, incorruptible, untainted by ego, vanity, and politics. Alas, as we have learned, that also meant untainted by experience, toughness, cunning, and marksmanship. Lawyers make poor gunfighters.

But shooting a man takes one of two things: an overwhelming fear of one’s own death, which Nick did not have in the least; or conviction. It turned out he lacked this component as well.

He wanted to get away: this was like something out of Faulkner or Penn Warren, blasphemed southern ground, soaked in blood a generation old, white trash and black, white innocence and black, all commingled in a very small area on the same day.

What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good.

You are the most contrary man I ever met. If someone handed you a glass of free beer that was nine-tenths full, you’d cry over the missing tenth.

Your idealism will get you killed or, worse, knighted, and you’ll spend the rest of your days among fools and MPs. As for me, the chance to refuse an audience with the queen would be exquisite.

If they’s interested, they wouldn’t believe it. If they believed it, they’d arrest me.

Reggie was accused, he must have decided that if he told about the meeting, there’d be consequences. It would get out that a revolution was being planned, that a communist northern agitator was down South stirring up the colored. White people would get upset, there’d be violence against the church, the whole thing would come apart. The Klan would ride again. White people were very frightened in those days, I recall.