“Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”

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.

I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.

Who you truly are is a place of no particular thing, but all things at once.

Tugay is writhing around all over the place as if he were dead

I’ve always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.

George had taken off all ten of his fingers and tied them into a bundle with what appeared to be either his own small intestines.

All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

And the percentage changes in wage rates would be the same for all job grades.