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1 " We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable. "
― William Styron , A Tidewater Morning
2 " I actually shivered at the insincerity that gripped me as I spoke these words: their falseness was shameful. I was sure my coolness would return. I'd just been caught with my guard down. But at the moment I was in shambles. Walking along the deck (adopting my old casual swagger), I jollied up the troops with small talk, put on a frozen grin, and kept murmuring to myself with rhythmic fatuity: You love the marine Corps, it's a terrific war, you love the Marine Corps, it's a terrific war... "
3 " I came to absorb the history of the Virginia Tidewater—that primordial American demesne where the land was sucked dry by tobacco, laid waste and destroyed a whole century before golden California became an idea, much less a hope or a westward dream—I realized that the Dabney farm must have been as nondescript and as pathetic a relic as any of the scores of shrunken, abandoned “plantations” scattered for a hundred miles across the tidelands between the Potomac and the James. "
