Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
21 quotes
"But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention."
"I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class"
"Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny."
"He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives."
"Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood."
"The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man."
"It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it."
"As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible."
"In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved."
"There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory."
"We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America."
"Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance."
"She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself."
"College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts."
"Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly."
"i was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities."
"Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation"
"Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen."
"it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress ."
"As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers."
"A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up."