The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.
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,...
One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
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...
I had the need to be the good master, but definitely the master, no matter what the cost.
I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.
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.
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 human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them.
Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.
Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.
Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.
Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
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.
Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.
It’s the southern way, Doctor. The southern way? she said. My mother’s immortal phrase. We laugh when the pain gets too much. We laugh when the pity of human life gets too . . . pitiful. We laugh when...
I taught Leah how to tell where we were in the Campo by using her sense of smell. The south side was glazed with the smell of slain fish and no amount of water or broom-work could ever eliminate the t...
I blaze with a deep sullen magic, smell lust like a heron on fire; all words I form into castles then storm them with soldiers of air. What I seek is not there for asking. My armies are fit and well t...