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.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.

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 story untold could be the one that kills you.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.

We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.

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.

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.

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.

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.

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.

Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.

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.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.