If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.
He had never seen such eyes before, not even in the faces of soldiers unmanned in the midst of great carnage. Eyes like black mirrors, at once shallow and bottomless. He had the feeling that if he pre...
Faith is something you have or you don’t, and to pretend you do in the hope of gaining some last-minute dispensation from a being whose existence you have denied all your life goes against everything...
Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in...
Don’t keep a girl guessing too long, or she’ll find the answer somewhere else.
Broad is the gate that leads to destruction, but narrow the way that leads to salvation. . . .
As we move, a roar like the voice of some satanic creature bellows from the staircase. The fire’s voice. I’ve heard it in lots of places, and the sound turns my insides to jelly. There’s a reason huma...
And the black politicians…my God. I’ve watched black aldermen do patently illegal things and then brag about it. They don’t care whether something is legal or not. White politicians abused the system...
About twenty minutes ago, during a commercial break, Melba had thought she’d heard a helicopter in the distance. Tom had been unable to hear it, but that was no surprise, given his progressive hearing...
A man lives morally all his life, then in one weak moment commits an act that damns him in his own eyes and threatens his liberty, even his life.
To yearn for ignorance is to embrace the wishful thinking of a child. For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop.
Some of what she said actually offended me. Caitlin truly was a liberal when she arrived in Natchez, and she routinely chastised me for being too conservative. But now it seems that her liberal convic...
Some harsher truths: that the world they will find beyond the borders of Mississippi looks very different from the one that nurtured them to this point; that the whites among them might soon find them...
Lot. She saw a guy carrying a small suitcase out
Kidnaping.
Her? I wonder. Tom? I say, taking advantage of
Have crystal meth over in Natchez? Of course we do. I’m not interested in the meth. I’m interested in the men who make and sell it. Walker’s eyes narrow, then go wide with comprehension. And what exac...
Hair. He’s bald now. But he still looks like he could ride a bull ragged. I jump at the sound of the garage door. Mom gives me a little wave, then crosses the kitchen as silently as if she were floati...
A military base, to check out the story.
You said you had enough evidence to convict Jonathan Sands of money laundering on your own. That’s correct. I’d like to see that evidence. I’d like a chocolate chip cookie without the chips. Mr. Cage—