The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask.

William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book, The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It's a crowning achievement of his own storied career.

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.

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.

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.

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

Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses?