“Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”

“I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.”

“Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.”

“I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.”

“Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.”

“The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.”

“Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.”