Other people's ideas of us are dependent largely on what they've hoped for.

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.

She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.

A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.

I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.

Look closer and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.