Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.
Than appreciating the calm voice of Charleston during an evening walk along the Battery with Fort Sumter off in the distance, the great white houses at one’s back, palmettos rattling their leaves in a...
They say this war is a cloud over the land! But they make the weather and then they stand in the rain and say, ‘Shit, it’s raining!
They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind.
So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement—the cure for everything that ails you.
It is best not to study too much on who gets what they deserve. It can lead to an overly complicated interpretation of God’s personal attributes.
It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.
Inman guessed Swimmer's spells were right in saying a man's spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living. They could take deathblows independently. He was himself a case in poi...
If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday.
Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment’s lost attention, and it’...
Bleak as the scene was, though, there was growing joy in Inman's heart. He was nearing home; he could feel it in the touch of thin air on skin, in his longing to see the lead of hearth smoke from the...
And also forever too late for Lily to learn that raging passion predicts nothing but a mess of bad news for everybody.
A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either t...
She knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it mean...
Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just...
You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.
V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation—twenty-five years at least—and the anger in both directions dissipates....
The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions. Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we...
Subtract everything inessential from America and what's left? Geography and political philosophy, V says. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The Federalist Papers. --I'd say geography a...
She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerful...