“Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”

The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.

You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

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.

Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.

For me, it’s always been so obvious that the less we can edit our lives and more we show how normal we all are, the better.

This city, all they want us to be is ourselves. You love us how we are. We’re all a work in progress as men and you still love us and I thank you so much for embracing us.

Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us in different directions.

The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened.

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

My own laugh is the real thing and I’ve had it all my life.

Trade is critical to us all – it ensures we have what we need to live, that the NHS gets the equipment it needs to save lives, and that developing countries can prosper.