You’re going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It’s the hardest role in the world.
He lived out his whole life as an anthem to the pleasures of a bad mood.
Lightning flashed around the island; thunder played its favorite game of scaring the crap out of all the shivering mortals on the earth below.
San Francisco is a city that requires a fine pair of legs, a city of cliffs misnamed as hills, honeycombed with a fine webbing of showy houses that cling to the slanted streets with the fierceness of abalones.
Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination.
I’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means – some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.
I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.
Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.
I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and with a tongue fluent only in praise.
Yet I can walk away from best friends and rarely think of them again. I can close a door and not look back. There’s something about my soul that’s always ready to go, to break camp, to unfold the road map, to leave at night when the house inspection’s done and the civilians are asleep and the open road is calling...
It was funny how we thought education to be the great gilded key which would solve all problems, eliminate all poverty and disease, eradicate differences between social classes, and bring the children of okra-planters up to par with the children of emperors.
The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.
Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility.
One noteworthy thing about South Carolina is the quality of school-bus drivers in the state. To qualify for a bus license one must have reached puberty and be able to recite the alphabet without stuttering.
I reveled in class discussion and the Socratic method of drawing substance out of calcified minds untrained to think.
I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.
I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.
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, humiliated – and 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 write – the 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 read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.