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

“Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of sci...”

“I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic.”

“This [sand-dollar hunting] had become one of our rituals together, and though she would search for other varieties of shells when I was out of town or unable to see her, she would wait until I appe...”

“I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnes...”

“It was in her garden that whatever physical grace Abigail St. Croix possessed asserted itself. She moved among her flowers with consummate natural fluidity, enjoying the incommunicable pleasures of...”

“MORNINGTIDEThe wonderful works of morningtidebring the sight of luminous whiteness,a breathing whimsyamong wind-tossed sprigs of green.”

“Tender," she said again. "Tender is kind and gentle. It's also sore, like the skin around an injury.”

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness. Nothing is so gentle as real strength.”

“What we need to do is treat some of our thoughts like door to door salesmen. If someone comes to your door and asks if he can come inside and throw some dirt on your floor to demonstrate his vaccuu...”

“The old refrain is that there are no atheists in foxholes. That's nonsense. They are there by the millions. There is little in combat that will lead one to look upon the Creator with favor. What ca...”

“Let a woman too close, and while she sucked your cock, she sucked your brains and manhood right out of you, too.”

“Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101.”

“The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.”

“And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.”