Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.

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

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.