I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.