Except you can’t put anything behind you. Nothing is lost until death. You wear your history like a necklace, a smelly one made of garlic. Whether you tuck it under your collar or let it dangle loose, nothing is lost.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music.

The Legion of White Decency was the Northerners’ version of the Ku Klux Klan, you see. They marched in the same white sheets, they burned the same crosses … Most of the history books talk more about the KKK than they do about the Legion of White Decency, and a lot of people don’t even know there was such a thing. I think it might be because most of the histories have been written by Northerners and they’re ashamed.

The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague--the black death--decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We've become so used to the idea of the flu--it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn't it?--that no one but the historians seem to know that a hundred years ago it didn't exist.

Any big hotels have got scandals," he said. "Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go. Sometimes one of em will pop off in his room, heart attack or stroke or something like that. Hotels are superstitious places. No thirteenth floor or room thirteen, no mirrors on the back of the door you come in through, stuff like that. [...]