The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.

Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

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