Eventually I'd like to have a family. I'd like to not be limping around when I'm 50 years old.
The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood. '
Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.
There's no word in the language I revere more than 'teacher. ' My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I've honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
I like my life. I've had a good life. I think the reason is my parents taught me that life is a burden. But if you take it one day at a time, it's an easy burden.
What [companies] are doing is they're leaving our country, and they're, believe it or not, leaving because taxes are too high and because some of them have lots of money outside of our country.
It doesn't make any difference how much money a father earns, his name is always Dad-Can-I. . . . Like all other children, my five have one great talent: they are gifted beggars. Not one of them ever ran into the room, looked up at me, and said, "I'm really happy that you're my father, and as a tangible token of my appreciation, here's a dollar.
I am a thinned-skinned type. I am very sensitive, very emotional. Vulnerability is kind of always a part of my day.