The Lords of Discipline

by Pat Conroy

The sweetness of Southern women often conceals the secret deadliness of snakes. It has helped them survive the impervious tyranny of Southern men more comfortable with a myth than a flesh-and-blood woman.

My father’s discipline was harsh and unmistakable; the discipline of my mother disguised itself in love and tenderness and often held far greater terrors.

Young girls have an infinite capacity for being attracted to the wrong sort of men.

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

There was an amazingly limitless capacity for ruthlessness at the heart of the family of man.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration, like an albino. Like the albino it has no protective coloration.

I felt that ancient inconsequentiality of being a male as I witnessed the rosy elaboration of her body. Here, then, at last, was divinity, the limitless mystery, the infinite strength of women. Was this why I had always been afraid of them?