I don't know if I would do sequels. I almost feel like when I'm done with them, they're going to have to find their own way.

I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was...young.

I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.

Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.

That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness.

Perhaps the most important thing we can ever do in our lives is find a way to keep the wild-both the wild inside and the wild outside us-and tap into it.

I don't think you ever think of a big city as sweet or community, but there are cities that I think of as charming and particular and interesting cities. I live in one now, Charleston.