The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.
Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly...
I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.
Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.
The human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them.
One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I w...
We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother...
Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: introit, offertory, liturgy, movable feast, the minor elevation, the lavabo, the apparition of Lourdes,...
My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals...
Time moves funny and it's hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it gives you only one chance.
Man wonders but God decidesWhen to kill the Prince of Tides.
In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.
I had the need to be the good master, but definitely the master, no matter what the cost.
Words are pretty, but anyone can talk. Pay attention to the people who perform.
These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.
The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.