“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.”

Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.

Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

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.

All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.

A good thing never ends.

There is no limit to what the Lord can do in and with and through any individual or any married couple who surrender themselves and their resources completely to His will and His way.

It could be the end of a story. It could be the beginning.

Sometimes a “mistake” can end up being the best decision you ever make

Stopping the endless pursuit of getting somewhere else is the perhaps most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.

Where desire ends up causing suffering is when it fixates.

Life has to end, love doesn’t.