“Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.”

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.

Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.

There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.

My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

A brilliant poet is at work here-a poet in the rugged landscape of conflict and pain.

New York State is giant and has some of the most beautiful landscape on the Eastern seaboard.

The way superheroes dominate the fictional landscape now, along with dystopian futures and zombies. Yeah, definitely – I think these stories function as a kind of mythology for us.

I stand, limited primitive, sentimentalist, escapist The way I shape this landscape, automatically makes this, vivid I give it a rivet, hold it, stand at the pivot I love it, learn to live it, then give you my exhibit

I was a grill cook at McDonalds for a little bit. I did landscape for a little bit. I played a lot in the bar scene, I played countless sets of acoustic songs in that arena.

The mighty edifice of Government science dominated the scene in the middle of the 20th century as a Gothic cathedral dominated a 13th century landscape. The work of many hands over many years, it universally inspired admiration, wonder and fear.

The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.

The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man.