“I'm never bored. Only people bore me, so I avoid them”

“I fared better than many of the people I wrote about in this book; yet even so, over the course of the events depicted here, I lost the person I cared for most. The war didn't get her; it got me.”

“He was a newspaperman,' he said, 'but there's some people who should never leave Savannah.”

“All we can do in life is play along and hope that we get it right. ”

“We aren't who we appear to be on the outside...We keep up appearances in order to survive...”

“It is now 55 years since my last book report, which is a long time to live with a guilty conscience. So here it is: In the spring of 1956 I wrote a highly favorable review of the Bible without reading a word of it, and it was the last A I ever got in English. Why it has taken so long to come clean I'm not sure, except I have always been extremely sensitive about my academic reputation.”

“I want you to know that I'm just like you, and, just like you, sometimes I have a little trouble holding things together.”