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

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.

She had awakened something in him that had slumbered far too long. Not only did he feel passion, he felt the return of hope.

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

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 lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.