“So we're going ghosting. Our stories lie everywhere, just like our bones, more wild rides than you ever dreamt of, all the daring you want, and all the beauty. Freedom wasn't dull and plodding; it flamed across that Victorian sky like a rocket, it sang in the wind, it made a whole generation into world-changers. And we're going to tell it, if we have to howl in through your keyholes and the cracks in your walls; if we have to haunt your children, and steal across your borders to whisper legends in the ears of strangers.”

“I loved the landscape, the heat, the unhurried days, the fragrant and languorous nights. But there was something else, too; a sense of belonging that went beyond birth, that held me to a past beyond my own, to an identity I could no more discard than I could discard my own skin. I was a Southerner, all the way through to the bone.”

“There is a history that really happened, but none of us will ever know exactly what it was. The other one, the one we think we know, is made by us, and we remake it every time we look at it.”

“We dared the impossible, did the undoable, bore the unbearable, not merely once but over and over again. I don't believe in fate or inevitable destinies, as I keep telling folks. But I do believe in a certain kind of inevitability. When you plant a potato, you get a potato. When you plant a rose, you get a rose. There is a pattern already in the seed, and it will unfold according to its nature.”

“We fashion our destinies with our own hands, by deed or by default, one decade, one year, one hour at a time.”

“The South was a special place, a chosen people, the best of all possible worlds.”

“All of my work is, in one way or another, about power. Who has it and why? Who doesn't have it and why? What happens to people and societies when power relationships become seriously unequal? How are power structures and power relationships created, how are they maintained, how are they changed? What ideas and myths form their foundations? What are the connections between power and religion? Power and sexuality? Power and ethics? Power and the use of violence?”