The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

where nothing was explained to children except the supremacy of the concept of loyalty. I learned from my mother that loyalty was the pretty face one wore when you based your whole life on a series of egregious lies.

eyes. I learned to kill with my prayers, learned to hate when I should have been praising God.

hate the words family loyalty more than any two words in the language.

There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.

The city always stimulated some long-dormant gland of self-improvement when I crossed her rivers. I would never feel good enough for New York,

“You don’t think it’s written mostly for women?” she asked. “No, it’s written for people. Men and women who feel passionately. It’s meant to edify, even to amaze, but it does not require a certain politics to understand or enjoy. What is extraordinary about her poetry is not her politics.

the veils and gauderies of an overripe theology.

There were probably more children born of the rhythm method in the 1950s than were sired by random sex.

For four straight years, from 1952 to 1956, my mother was pregnant. She carried each child full term and each child was stillborn.

She’s like five pounds of dead shrimp. There’s nothing to say hello to or goodbye to. Just something to plant in the ground when your mother gets home.”

I pried her arms loose from the cold, still body of Rose Aster. “Let me hold her, Tom,” Savannah cried out. “She was going to be our sister and no one ever stopped a moment to love her.

Dad said the reason she loses the babies is because we’re so bad and don’t give her any peace of mind.”

the black laughter of subjugation.

“That we’re better than anyone in this town.”

“You’re the only one I can trust,”

You’re the only one I care for. That’ll be our secret, Tom.

she made me an unwilling co-conspirator in her undeclared war against Luke and Savannah. She bound me in an unsolvable dilemma: By agreeing to become her most trusted confederate I was also giving my consent to the betrayal of the two people I loved

I left her room less of a child.

mother took both Savannah and Luke aside, isolated them as she had done me, and took them into the strictest confidence. She told them the exact same thing she told me, that she could trust only them, that

By dividing us, she left herself in control, impregnable, the softest enigma in our lives.

I think my father loved us, but there has never been a more awkward or deviant love. He considered a slap to the face a valentine delivered.

“Tom, I need you to remember things for me. I can’t

So Savannah began to write, filling a small school notebook with the jottings and chiselings of her daily life.

On our left shoulders an ambassador of Satan acted in maleficent counterbalance to our guardian angel. This devil, a black articulate seraph, tried to lead us toward the succulents of perdition. The duality led to much theological confusion. But Savannah welcomed two invisible companions into her life. She called the good angel Aretha; the dark angel was called Norton.

my mother burned my sister’s notebook

memory, that evening carried weightlessly all the grandeur of celebration, all the rich courses of a feast we considered timeless, and all the love that flowed without effort when the three of us locked arms in our perfect, extravagant affection for each other.

it was the last happy ending that the three of us would ever have together.

“No husband will ever forgive her for marrying him. The

I withdrew into a self-made enclosure of impenetrable solitude, and the women who tried to touch me there—all of them—drew back in utter horror as I wounded them again

dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

“Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas

She maintained an innocent trust in horoscopes and planned her days around the proud alignment of stars

Tolitha was the most Christian woman I have ever known.

Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit’s harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. “That’s the southern way,” my grandmother said. “That’s the nice way.”

Yemassee Indians, and it was considered a mark of eminence that there was not a single Yemassee remaining on earth.

Winthrop Ogletree had the face of an unlucky vampire who never received an adequate portion of blood.

funeral home hilarity pee in pants

my first unforgettable lesson about the disfiguring cruelty of class in my own southern town.

And from that day on we never saw her adorn her glorious hair with a single blossom, nor was she ever in our long childhood invited to a single gala.

Isabel Newbury for stealing the flowers from my mother’s hair.

my father would instruct us in this part of our legacy. He would say, “If you can’t beat up an enemy at school, wait twenty years and beat up his wife and kid.”

“Now, I’m going to hit the paddle on this geography book. Every time I do, you give out a yelp. Make it convincing. Because I’m going to tell Reese Newbury that I tore your butt up.”

I decided to become a schoolteacher.

I won’t have you acting like your father. I won’t have it, do you hear?” “You’re acting like our father,” Savannah said, and the house grew deadly still

kind of decay that begins in the heart and works its way out to the eyes.

just go ahead and admit that your family’s shit? It takes a real man to face up to reality.

her children later devised a list of occupations in which our mother would have excelled. She could have prospered, we decided, as a princess in an obscure Himalayan country, an assassin of minor cabinet officials, a fire-eater, the wife of the chairman of AT&T, or a belly dancer who brought the heads of saints to kings.

From my father I inherited a sense of humor, a capacity for hard work, physical strength, a dangerous temper, a love of the sea, and an attraction to failure. From my mother I received far darker and more valuable gifts: a love of language, the ability to lie without remorse, a killer instinct, a passion to teach, madness, and the romance of fanaticism.

the archetype

my ideas have always been ahead of their time, Lila.