All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.
Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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
Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.
Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.
She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.
Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.
If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you.
Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.
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.
The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book, The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It's a crowning achievement of his own storied career.
The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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