I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.

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

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

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.