“In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.”

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.

Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.

A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.

From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.

It’s hard for me to think of others because I’m not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.

No matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . .

I said to him, “State your business, mortal!” There was no need for me to call him “mortal” or to speak like a sixteenth-century knight. It just sounded cool.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures.