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Quotes by Writer
"I was a watchful boy being raised by a father I didn't admire. In a desperate way, I needed the guidance of someone who could show me another way of becoming a man. It was sometime during the year when I decided I would become the kind of man that Bill Dufford was born to be. I wanted to be the type of man that a whole town could respect and honor and fall in love withthe way Beaufort did when Bill Dufford came to town to teach and shape and turn its children into the best citizens they could be."
"Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains."
"It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief."
"Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science."
"I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in."
"I envy the tireless intimacy of women's friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength."
"Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers."
"It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it."
"The teachers of my life saved my life and sent me out prepared for whatever life I was meant to lead. Like everyone else, I had some bad ones and mediocre ones, but I never had one that I thought was holding me back because of idleness or thoughtlessness. They spent their lives with the likes of me and I felt safe during the time they spent with me. The best of them made me want to be just like them. I wanted young kids to look at me the way I looked at the teachers who loved me. Loving them was not difficult for a boy like me. They lit a path for me, and one that I followed with joy."
"I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told."
"The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life."
"Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration."
"Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them."
"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."
"Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage."
"I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment."
"In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game."
"Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers"
"Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true."
"The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean."
"Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance."
"Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air."
"I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell."
"There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss."
"I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting."
"My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself."
"Gonzaga was the kind of place you'd not even think about loving until you'd left it for a couple of years."
"I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'"
"I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta."
"As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers."
"Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide."
"Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth."
"A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out."
"I never seemed to learn from joy, I earned my portion of wisdom through sadness."
"A family is one of nature's solubles, it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater."
"She had a grocer's faith in books, they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts."
"Throughout my career I've lived in constant fear that I wouldn't be good enough, that I'd have nothing to say, that I'd be laughed at, humiliatedand I'm old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I'll ever write. As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I'm supposed to writethe grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don't quite know it. But I trust I'll begin to know it soon."
"I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid."
"It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts."
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