“Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.”

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 can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.