We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.

Of the Yamacraw children, I can say little. I don't think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their birth.

She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.

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

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.