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

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen.

I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.

We die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet.

You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.

Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.

The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.

Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary

One does not know where love will take you.

The institution of marriage is obsolete.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Any place that anyone can learn something useful from someone with experience is an educational institution.

The institutions that we’ve built up over the years to protect our individual privacy rights from the government don’t apply to the private sector.

Each department and institution has its own authorities and responsibilities, and they act on that basis.

Religion is separate from the institution of the state.

There is no Kurdish state. But that shouldn’t prevent the Kurds from continuing to develop their own institutions. Still, the best thing for them would be to remain a part of Iraq, but in return we must treat them with respect – their nationality, their language and their culture.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.