The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

If Henry Wingo had not been a violent man, I think he would have made a splendid father.

“When I was a child, my brothers and I walked on the backs of dolphins and whales.”

That is how she chose to remember it, how she chose to celebrate it, how she chose to put it down.

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.

I do not like cities that dishonor their own marshes.

People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”

“It’s the southern way, Doctor.” “The southern way?” she said. “My mother’s immortal phrase. We laugh when the pain gets too much. We laugh when the pity of human life gets too . . . pitiful. We laugh when there’s nothing else to do.” “When do you weep . . . according to the southern way?” “After we laugh, Doctor. Always. Always after we laugh.”

Teach them this, Tom, and teach them very well: Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly, as your spirit moves through me.

Presumin’ ain’t bein’.

but I kept returning to myself, able to tell the story only through my own eyes.

I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents’ definition of me.

My parents had succeeded in making me a stranger to myself.

They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull.

Somewhere I had lost touch with the kind of man I had the potential of being.

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,

We did not know then that she was a most unhappy woman.