The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.'

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

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.