Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

It is the secret life that sustains me now, and as I reach the top of that bridge I say it in a whisper, I say it as a prayer, as regret, and as praise. I can't tell you why I do it or what it means, but each night when I drive toward my southern home and my southern life, I whisper these words: 'Lowenstein, Lowenstein.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

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

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.