The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.
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.
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.
We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.
Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.
I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.
I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.
We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve got to be patient enough to wait for them.
My mother raised me to be a writer.
Of the Yamacraw children, I can say little. I don’t think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their birth.
The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
I realized early that unless you’re willing to kill the innocent, you can’t win.
The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.
We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.
I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.
We’ve pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we’re all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.
It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.
My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.