"Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk."
— Pat Conroy

"Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Memory in these incomparable streets, in mosaics of pain and sweetness, was clear to me now, a unity at last. I remembered small and unimportant things from the past: the whispers of roommates during thunderstorms, the smell of brass polish on my fingertips, the first swim at Folly Beach in April, lightning over the Atlantic, shelling oysters at Bowen's Island during a rare Carolina snowstorm, pigeons strutting across the graveyard at St. Philip's, lawyers moving out of their offices to lunch on Broad Street, the darkness of reveille on cold winter mornings, regattas, the flash of bagpipers' tartans passing in review, blue herons on the marshes, the pressure of the chinstrap on my shako, brotherhood, shad roe at Henry's, camellias floating above water in a porcelain bowl, the scowl of Mark Santoro, and brotherhood again."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"South Carolina is in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital."
— Eliza Lucas Pinckney