"And what will they do then, eh, Peleg?"
"I suppose the rascals in Congress will vote the funds to send the Army here, butcher the young, and transport the rest of us south to the fields of the cotton lords," responded Peleg and meaning every word of it.

Still, I agreed with Peleg that he was not crazy. Rather, in some ways, the exact opposite. It seemed to me he was always saying things so extreme and different that you instantly saw they were oddly true.

Uncle Billy's basic view of the rich was that the only acts that would arouse them from complete lethargy were fornication or cheating the poor.

Uncle Billy remarked with spirit that he guessed most people would rather deal with a person lucky enough to have two childhoods rather than someone who had never had one.

"I didn't dare have a minister here. Billy would have climbed right out of that box and said something awful." People laughed and wiped their eyes. "So I'll say what needs to be said." He looked around at us. "Many of us on Naushon at this time are in doubt about a God or a Heaven in a world filled with the stench of evil. But perhaps we don't understand something and Billy isn't just gone, but gone to some new life. Well, God, if there is a paradise, we ask that you invite this gentle blasphemer into your peaceable kingdom." Judge Folger paused and cleared his throat. "And, God, if Heaven is just some terrible copy of earth without honesty or fairness, filled with the proper and the stiff, so that Billy cannot be admitted, then I, Moses Folger, pray at the end of my time to go to Uncle Billy. If we are damned, we will be damned laughing, and to hell with piety and hypocrisy!"