I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

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

A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.