I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
Who can tell? Together, with God’s blessing — which surely He will not withhold — you may perhaps be laying the groundwork, the foundation for a future Athens, an Athens of the South. Yes. And this yo...
She’d rouse me out of bed all hours of the night and I’d wait in the hall. They were mostly soldiers and sailors and merchant mariners, or businessmen down on convention. This is one lousy life, Mamma...
Love has failed us. We are essentially, irrevocably alone. Anything that seems to combat that loneliness is a trap-Love is a trap:
But it was one thing to condemn him when court had adjourned and you looked back on what he had done, and it was another different thing entirely when you were sitting on the jury with a man’s life in...
Next morning at breakfast he paid Mamma four hundred dollars, cash on the table, for that one night. I watched him count the money out of his wallet, and while I watched I thought what a good thing it...
He was always on hand for misfortune, among the first to arrive when tragedy struck, and for this reason was known as Light Hearse Harry.
Thats the trouble with having money; you think about buying almost anything you see.
Jeff and Amy were part of this, though never in the sense that the natives were. They were not indigenous: they were outlanders, ‘foreigners,’ distinguished by a sort of upcountry cosmopolitan glaze w...
For my part I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a...
But they were all thinking the selfsame thing: I might be a disgrace to my country. I might be a coward, even. But I'm not up there in those woods getting shot at
This was mainly a brown country, cluttered with dead leaves from the year before, but the oaks had tasseled and the redbud limbs were like flames in the wind. Fruit trees in cabin yards, peach and pea...
They were Amy and Jeff Carruthers and they rode south out of Bristol, gravel chattering under the upswept fenders. After a while the man said suddenly, Whats it like? Amy glanced out at the fields. Co...
There was beginning to be a sense of history, made immediate by the fact that an English king had given up his throne for a woman: the woman I love, the king said and they thrilled to hear him say it,...
It’s not any fun in the dark, he said, and she saw his eyes brimming with tears that glistened in the moonlight. She really felt sorry for him—even she. For what could be more pitiful than a voyeur in...
But as they walked home together through the leaf-plastered streets, under that eerie refulgence, her father seemed to have divined her plans. This was in his manner, not his words: they were halfway...
We were green; most of us had never left home before (officers as well as men, except the officers carried their greenness better) yet here we were, traveling south up an enemy river past slow creeks...
They nodded their heads with quick flicky motions, like birds, and nursed their rifles, keeping them out of the dirt. I had gotten to know them all in a month and a few of them were even from the same...
Saturday and Sunday nights the long gray car would be parked among Fords and Chevrolets, as if it had littered or spawned on the gravel quay beside the club. Inside, the five-man Negro band pumped jaz...
Originally it was intended to put the names of the war dead on the signboard, the whites down one side and the Negroes down the other, with the American flag between. But the notion of having them all...