The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

As her children, we were the trustees of her dazzling evensongs of the imagination, but we did not know that mothers dreamed.

But I know we’re screwing you up a little bit every day. If we knew how we were doing it, we’d stop. We wouldn’t do it ever again, because we adore you. But we’re parents and we can’t help it. It’s our job to screw you up.

It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me.

One member of the family, by a process of artificial but deadly selection, is nominated to be the lunatic, and all neurosis, wildness, and displaced suffering settles like dust in the eaves and porches of that tenderest, most vulnerable psyche.

To love one’s children is to love oneself, and this was a state of supererogatory grace denied my parents by birth and circumstance. I needed

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.

Because I’m an American, I let her die by degrees, isolated and abandoned by her family.

In happy times, love poured out of me like bright honey from a stolen hive. But in times of hurt and loss I withdrew into a self-made enclosure of impenetrable solitude,

“I’ve always thought that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

“It’s simply, the last stage of life. The most interesting stage, I imagine,”

Larceny is not a difficult crime to condone unless your childhood was the item stolen.

I had more in common with a thesaurus than I did with a teacher and the sophomores of Colleton County suffered because of my ineptitude.