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.
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.
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.
Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.
The human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them.
Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
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.
Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.
I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
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.
Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.
The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
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.
A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts...
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.
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.
The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
 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 ){kind=small}
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.
I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
