“Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.”

A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.

I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.

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.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.