Beach Music

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

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.

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

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

We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.

Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

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 pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.

…Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak—and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.

Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.

Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

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

Words are pretty, but anyone can talk. Pay attention to the people who perform.

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

Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.

And I was glad she had the camera as a fence to protect herself, an excuse to be invisible. Cameras are a lifesaver for the very shy people who have nowhere else to hide.

Her view of men was one-dimensional, but not inaccurate: men were prisoners of their genitalia and women were the keepers of the keys to paradise.