In the meantime, though, while I'm here, I'm just trying to put together a little dough so I can cast myself like a pebble into another pond."
-- Liborio (chapter 1 paragraph 8)

Importance: This line from Liborio during one of his flashbacks indicates to us that early on after arriving in the United States, his plan is still to continue moving on from place to place without a specific goal in life. His main motive is to just save money and go on surviving by any means necessary, without attaching himself to a particular person or place.

I get on a red bus that's just pulled up in front of me, pay my fare, and zoom like a rocket toward the back row, where brutes like me tend to go so we don't frighten the blacks and whites - because we're gray, and gray here is a sort of limbo cut off from both God and...
-- Liborio (chapter 1 paragraph 5)