“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.”

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.

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.

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep.

My legs are falling asleep, i blurted. It wasnt a total lie. I was experiencing tingling sensations all through my body, legs included. I could solve that. Patchs hands closed on my hips.

I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

All humans are dead except those who have knowledge; and all those who have knowledge are asleep, except those who do good deeds.

To remain unconscious of being is to remain asleep to our own reality and therefore asleep to reality at large. The choice is simple: awaken to being or sleep an endless sleep.

Today I fell asleep reading a book. The book is called INSOMNIA. I win.

That’s when the magic happens- when everyone else is asleep and you’re awake thinking about the world as it is, and the world as it could be. Make the most of those moments.