In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some...
It had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was...
There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty,...
The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wish...
Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.
I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbi...
I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.
I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.
No man or woman has the right to humiliate children, even in the sacrosanct name of education. No one has the right to beat children with leather straps, even under the sacred auspices of all school b...
Like many men and women who make egregious and irretrievable mistakes with their own children, she would redeem herself by becoming the perfect grandmother.
It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as...
I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
Even then, her interior life was far more important to her than her external one.
A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.