[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

It's not a secret that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

It seemed possible to me, in the dry heat of that courtroom, that heaven was a metaphor for the grace of perspective you get when you die

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

Death would not be called bad, o people, if one knew how to truly die.

If the [Republican] party wants to have an ideological debate, it's never going to win anything in a major way.

It's the opportunity to play something completely different, responding to what happened just before you started to play, and I love that.

The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the below things. They are the ones who gave us one of the most beautiful words in our language, the word enthusiasm.

In my experience, previously counted chickens never do hatch.

I learned I could live more than one life in a lifetime.