Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

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.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.