“Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic....”

“Too many dogs continue to be abused and abandond - one is too many - and people continue to kill people for money and envy and no reason at all. Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that's not the end of the story. Miracles happen that nobody sees, and among us walk heroes who are never recognised, and people live in loneliness because they cannot believe they are loved”

“To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.”

“I fell in love with her for her sense of humour. If she ever lost her sense of humour, I would have to dump her. Then I'd kill myself because I couldn't live without her.”

“When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she'd made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and a failure.Her judgement of his work was arrogant. What else of consequence did she ever write? And of the two, who was dead - and who was not?”

“I realized that loving people, depending on them, NEEDING them, is just too dangerous. Love is just a way to set you up for a bad fall. It's the rug they pull out from under you at the very moment you decide that everything's going to be fine. We're all so ephemeral. So fragile. And life's so unpredictable.”

“...a wasted opportunity wasn't just a missed chance, but was a wound to your future. Miss too many opportunities, thus sustaining too many wounds, and you wouldn't have a future at all.”