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

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of...

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination.

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

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, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent...

I have built a city from the books I’ve read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

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

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 feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned...

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

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

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 can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.

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

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

Mansions were forming like jewels in my bloodstream.

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

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.

As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.

Help them, but don’t make friends with them.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.

The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation

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

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, “the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

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 safe protectorate of his soft, uncritical maleness, I never wholly appreciated him. I did not know how to cherish sanctity,...

Before I met the Jesuits, I’d never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.

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.

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, “had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man.

We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

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.

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...

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.

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.

When friends come to Rome in early summer to visit me I like to take them to the Pantheon during thunderstorms and stand them beneath the opening of the feathery, perfectly proportioned dome as rain falls through the open roof against the marble floor and lightning scissors through the wild and roiled skies. The emperor...

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer … I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn’t sound pretentious or ditzy.

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

That’s the nice way.

I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to...

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

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

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

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.