When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation. - Randall Jarrell

Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, “That were to consider it too curiously.”

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning...