“No country that permits firearms to be widely and randomly distributed among its population – especially firearms that are capable of wounding and killing human beings – can expect to escape violence, and a great deal of violence.”

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as – carried too far – one of its weaknesses.

Pigs and cows and chickens and people are all competing for grain.

Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.

There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman.

I think rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature.

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

Jealousy is not a barometer by which the depth of love can be read. It merely records the degree of the lover’s insecurity.

‎ When a person is born we rejoice, and when they’re married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened.

we came to realize that a civilization which rode roughshod over the way of life of other peoples was incorporating evil in its own way of life.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.

Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.

Sometimes, instead of helping people to advance, a discovery or an invention holds them back.

Blackberry winter, the time when the hoarforst lies on the blackberry blossoms; without this frost the berries will not set. It is the forerunner of a rich harvest.

You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

The ‘punch’ of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law – an imaginative escape from palling reality – hence, phenomena rather than persons are the logical ‘heroes.’