“Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?”

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.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn’t know how to ask.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Good writing … 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.

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.