The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

“I think you’ve committed a sin that not even God can forgive, Daddy,” Luke said darkly.

my racism issued forth from my passionate need to conform rather than from any serious credo or system of belief. I

That’s what this sport’s all about, men. It’s war, pure and simple.

The reason we play this game is to have fun.

Benji ain’t no nigger when we go out that door. Benji’s a teammate.

running boy turned to metaphor and the older man could see it where the boy could not. He would be good at running, always good at it, and he would always run away from the things that hurt him, from the people who loved him, and

Where can a man run or where can he hide when he looks behind him and sees that he is only pursued by himself?

that lost ring and describe it as the perfect, the most immaculate, gift. A perfect gift, she wrote, is always hidden too well, but never hidden from the poet.

misplaced opal,

like the white porpoise

she-owl,

Nothing was ever lost to Savannah; she transformed everything into mysterious sensuous gardens of language.

She could not break a lifelong habit of hiding her gifts.

Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined,

troubadours of the microscopic epiphany. They wrote about calyxes and pomegranates but their theme was meaninglessness. Nothing had ever made Savannah happier than when I admitted that I didn’t understand one of her poems.

not true poems must ne intelligble

learn to make art from the blood of brothers and tigers.

it is the way.”

All the fear and glory of Eden burst into a song of vengeance around the house by the river.

In the last moments

they were permitted to understand, to translate, but not to react. There is no mercy in the forest. That is not the way.

They loved nature and they loved their family. They heard their mother singing again. All of them led good lives. It was their way.

childrens stiry

I’m Tom Wingo, feminist, conservationist, white liberal, pacifist, agnostic, and because of all these things I can’t take myself seriously at all and neither can anyone else.

Why women don’t understand us is that we can never return their love in full measure. We have nothing to return.

“She decided to become Renata Halpern,

the dazzling connection between us, a triangle of wordless, uplifted love as we rose, our pulses touching, toward the light and terror of our lives. Diving down, we knew the safety and silence of that motherless, fatherless world;

heading “load displacement.” Then I saw my own blood obscuring the entry

Infant or Prague her father had brought back from World War II

demonic howling of the impaled accusatory dogs.

the menstruating angels hanging from the shower rod and the ceiling,

the Infant of Prague, lynched from the ceiling, his face disfigured and bruised, speaking to her in her mother’s voice, demanding that she maintain her silence.

dazzled me with words and images.

conroys purpose

my ritual role of savior, twentieth-century Christ figure, a

she has genius and her poetry comes from the pain of being human and the pain of surviving as a woman in our society.”

an outdated idea

If I had known how all of you were going to turn out, I would have murdered you in your sleep when you were babies.”

mom

I would face all the women of the world as strangers and adversaries.

The world can do worse than make an enemy of your mother, but not much.

majesty of words that she used like a peacock fanning his gorgeous tail feathers for the sheer joy of ostentation.

conroy

“I’ll never trust anyone who liked high school,” Savannah

true

middle age, a loss of purpose in her life. She did not know how to face a world without being a mother.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; its afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams. Throughout our lives these three dead and slaughtered men would teach us over and over of the abidingness, the terrible constancy, that accompanies a wound to the spirit. Though our bodies would heal, our souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation. Violence sends deep roots into the heart; it has no seasons; it is always ripe, evergreen.

stolen my pure sanction of a world administered by a God who loved me and who had created heaven and earth as an act of divine and scrupulous joy. Randy Thompson had defiled my image of the universe,

In silence we would honor our private shame and make it unspeakable.

good coaches can become the perfect unobtainable fathers that young boys dream about and rarely find in their own homes.

innocence is always sacred, but fear is not. Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.

Herbert pulled music from his violin as if he were lifting silk from a dressmaker’s table.

odd simile