Quotes from book

Beach Music

“Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.”

“We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.”

“Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.”

“It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.”

“Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.”

“I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.”

“I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.”

“I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.”

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

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

“Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.”

“Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.”

“But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.”

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