But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.

Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.

Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.

Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.

The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

He unscrewed the lid, set it on the dash, snorted from the bottle twice, banged the steering wheel, and said, 'You got to be ready to die every day - then you got a chance.'

Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.

I said shut up once already, with my mouth.

This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

The opening novel of the 'Bayou Trilogy' was the first one I finished.

I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.

There's no better makeup than confidence

Daring life, optimistic living.

What we're looking at is God's design, nature's template, and using that as a pattern to cut around and lay it down on a domestic model to duplicate that pattern that we see in nature.

It is dismal coming home, when there is nobody to welcome one!

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

Enjoy yourself, drink, call the life you live today your own; but only that, the rest belongs to chance.

Fundraising is proclaiming what we believe in such a way that we offer other people an opportunity to participate with us in our vision and mission.

I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

A pleasing face is no small advantage.