“Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.”

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It’s a crowning achievement of his own storied career.

William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book,

Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.

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.

When she’s drenched in agony and soaked in pain, her smile holds the art this world is dying to learn.

I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how can that be? I know not, but I feel the agony.

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I am torn in two.

I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn’t want to be an academic.

Forgiveness gives birth to freedom so forgive them and set yourself free from the delusion of their chains and from the agony in your reality.

We don’t like trading agony for money

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

When most people don’t know what real agony is, some of us live on the hope that “someday things might get better”, being not really sure if they ever will.