The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

Because I needed to love my mother and father in all their flawed, outrageous humanity, I could not afford to address them directly about the felonies committed against all of us. I could not hold them accountable or indict them for crimes they could not help. They, too, had a history—one that I remembered with both tenderness and pain, one that made me forgive their transgressions against their own children. In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

Though I hated my father, I expressed that hatred eloquently by imitating his life, by becoming more and more ineffectual daily, by ratifying all the cheerless prophecies my mother made for both my father and me. I thought I had succeeded in not becoming a violent man, but even that belief collapsed: My violence was subterranean, unbeheld. It was my silence, my long withdrawals, that I had turned into dangerous things. My viciousness manifested itself in the terrible winter of blue eyes. My wounded stare could bring an ice age into the sunniest, balmiest afternoon. I was about to be thirty-seven years old, and with some aptitude and a little natural ability, I had figured out how to live a perfectly meaningless life, but one that could imperceptibly and inevitably destroy the lives of those around me.

It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.

From her mistakes, she had codified an unadulterated ethic: Love was not a bridesmaid of despair; love did not have to hurt.

But my grandmother brought back from her journeys a revolutionary doctrine: Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.

If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.

IF YOU GROW up in the house of a man who both loves and mistreats you, and who does not grasp the paradox of his behavior, you become, out of self-defense, a tenacious student of his habits, a weatherman of his temperament.

After reading her friends, I thought that all modern poets should be immunized against abstruseness.

it balance and fragility in a world askew with corrupt values. His faith had always been a form of splendid madness and his love affair with the world was a hymn of eloquent praise to the lamb who made him. There

I had neither a quarrel with nor addiction to winning. I had played on teams that had done both and though winning was better, it lacked that brittle sublimity, that slight wisdom one took from a game in which you played with all your heart and your effort fell short. I taught my boys that losing well was a gift, but that winning well was the stuff of authentic manhood.