Savannah was invariably gracious to strangers, but it was immune to their charms. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone. Time.
The megaselling books by celebrities are not so much books as products.
Nothing can be said, including this statement, that has not been said before.
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.
Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God, and I think it’s true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and never been depressed.
Rule number one: Always stick around for one more drink. That’s when things happen. That’s when you find out everything you want to know.
Loneliness is not being alone, It’s loving others to no avail.
By morning she was dead. She had not died of starvation or committed suicide by any conventional means. She had simply willed herself to die, and being a strong-willed woman, she had succeeded. She had missed dying on her birthday by two days.
Keep a diary, but don’t just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end – as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It’s great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.
For me, Savannah’s resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.
Don’t you feel cut off?” I asked. “Cut off from what?” she replied. “No, on the whole I’d say we rather enjoy our separateness.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,’ he wrote. ‘Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
How do you do that?” I asked. “What do witches eat?” “Witches loves pork meat,” she said. “They loves rice and potatoes. They loves black-eyed peas and cornbread. Lima beans, too, and collard greens and cabbage, all cooked in pork fat. Witches is old folks, most of them. They don’t care none for low-cal. You pile that food on a paper plate, stick a plastic fork in it, and set it down by the side of a tree. And that feeds the witches.” The.
Jim Williams’s guilt or innocence is no longer the issue,” he said. “Spencer Lawton’s incompetence is the issue.
That you are a worldly adult,’ she said. ‘You have spent your whole life letting go of the innocent dreams that made your childhood so warm and hopeful and full of certainty. Dream by dream you let them go. We all do it, to shield ourselves from disappointment. It’s easy to shed them. Not so easy to get them back.
Dr. Irving Stone of the Institute for Forensic Sciences in Dallas. He’s the guy who analyzed the clothing worn by President Kennedy and Governor Connally for the congressional committee that reexamined the Kennedy assassination.
The tides surged through the marsh and each wave that hit the beach came light-struck and broad-shouldered, with all the raw power the moon could bestow.
We’re not at all like the rest of Georgia. We have a saying: If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, ‘What’s your business?’ In Macon they ask, ‘Where do you go to church?’ In Augusta they ask your grandmother’s maiden name. But in Savannah the first question people ask you is ‘What would you like to drink?
Chigarid. The man who.
What was your name before that?” I asked. “Frank,” she said.