The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

My mother often seemed to despise everything my father stood for, but there were moments of strange complicity when I would see a look pass between them so charged with passion and awareness of the other that I would blush for having accidentally shared it.

She did not know that she was on a collision course with a boy so damaged and bewildered he would spend his whole life trying to figure out how love was supposed to feel, how it manifested itself between two people, and how it could be practiced without rage and sorrow and blood.

my racism issued forth from my passionate need to conform rather than from any serious credo or system of belief. I could hate with ardor but only if I was perfectly sure that my hatred echoed the sentiments of the majority. I was without moral courage of any kind and it suited me well.

I would rather have asked to suckle her right breast than ask her for ten dollars. The subject of money caused a new woman to be born in her soul; it also diminished her in her children’s eyes. It was not because she didn’t have it; it was because of how she made us feel when we asked for it.

“I don’t know what to believe when it comes from my children. I’ve been hurt by my children so many times that I don’t ever trust it when they’re nice to me. I keep wondering what they’re after and how they’re going to betray me.

I want to be in a place where if I go crazy for a while it will pass unnoticed. This town has driven me nuts by the sheer effort it’s taken to pretend I’m just like everyone else. I’ve always known I was different.

Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.

As I applauded, I knew that it would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.

“We’re lucky in America,” I said. “We don’t have to worry about a war on our own soil.” “I don’t know, Tom,” he said. “The world is a terribly fucked up place.”

my mother would prove to be a bold and unscrupulous one. She never apologized and never explained.

Nothing so affects a small town as the loss of its rarest and finest man. Nothing so affects a southern family as the death of the man who lent it balance and fragility in a world askew with corrupt values.

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.

I think you had more promise than any of us. But somewhere along the line you turned from something into not much. And you’ve got a good chance of turning into nothing, nothing at all.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

Whenever Big Money goes up against the Environment, Big Money always wins. It’s an American law, like the right of free assembly.

Beneath us, the city was laid out in a noiseless place setting of fire and crystal. New York was never the same city no matter how many times you saw it or from what angle. Nothing in God’s world was as beautiful as Manhattan Island seen from above at night.

One part of me wants you more than anything else in the world. The other part of me is terrified of any major change in my life. That’s the strongest part.”