You’re going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It’s the hardest role in the world.

Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood.

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the...

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I’d rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire...

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

That’s the nice way.

I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

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.

It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.

Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and...

The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor...

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

Mansions were forming like jewels in my bloodstream.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning...

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one’s existence a minor work of art.

College was to teach me that I was one of life’s journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell’s ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a...

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...

You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It’s a vicious cycle.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

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.

When you write by hand, you don’t have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, “Is this necessary at...

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

A man’s only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.

Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination.

It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed,...

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...

There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

In family matters you can get over anything. That’s one thing you’ll learn as an adult. There’s a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You’d never think of forgiving...

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

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...

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from...

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.