Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.

The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

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

I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.