It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.
It all makes more sense when I'm out here alone, he smiled. I can talk myself into anything.
I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.
I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn'...
I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
Her view of men was one-dimensional, but not inaccurate: men were prisoners of their genitalia and women were the keepers of the keys to paradise.
Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a cl...
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them...
Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.
We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.
Man wonders but God decidesWhen to kill the Prince of Tides.
Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the safe protectorate of his s...
I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class
You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.
The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest.
The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.
The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.
She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.
My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.