The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts...

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

...I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth.

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.

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.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

She had awakened something in him that had slumbered far too long. Not only did he feel passion, he felt the return of hope.

Perfect doesn't just mean happy. Perfect can have lots of different parts. - Niles.

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 mischief.

The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.

The human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them.

He treated the stars as though they were love songs written to him by God.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.

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.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull .

The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story.

Scarlett (O'Hara) taught that one could be hungry and despairing, but not broken and not without resources, spiritual in nature, that precluded one from surrendering without a fight

Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.

And I was glad she had the camera as a fence to protect herself, an excuse to be invisible. Cameras are a lifesaver for the very shy people who have nowhere else to hide.

Words are pretty, but anyone can talk. Pay attention to the people who perform.

The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.

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 mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

Take the local, take the express, don't get off till you reach success -- Sidney Rosen (Prince Of Tides)

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.

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day.

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

A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.

I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

I was born in the age of "alas".

...Father made a fetish out of performing tasks the correct way. There was an efficiency and economy of his motions that I always found a pleasure to watch and a pain to mimic.