The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

My mother’s tears are simply weapons to be counted when calculating the order of battle.”

I lack the courage to feed her, to clean up her shit, to ease her pain, to assuage the abysmal depths of her loneliness and exile.

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.

I was one of those men who killed their women slowly.

I needed students to complete myself.

Yet nothing my father could accomplish as a shrimper would ever have value to my mother. In my mother’s eyes, my father was vulnerable, helpless, and shrill.

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.

How much of my father would I bring to that singing girl’s life? How much of my mother? And how many days would it take before I, Tom Wingo, child of storm, would silence her laughter and song for all time? How long would it take for me to end the dance of that laughing girl who would not know the doubts and imperfections I brought to the task of loving a woman? I loved the image of this girl long before I ever met her and wanted to warn her to beware the day when I would come into her life.

When my father would tell that story, Savannah would always whisper, “Tell him the wrong number, Mama. Please tell him the wrong number.” Or she would say, “Forget the number, Dad. Just forget it.”

I’d do it differently now. Honestly, I would. But now isn’t then. And there’s no returning to then.”

You have to love what you can always come back to, what’s home waiting for you. I was thinking about time the other day. Not love, but time, and they’re related somehow but I’m not smart enough to know how exactly.

Nothing made me more edgy or neurotic than the silent hostility of people who loved each other.

They both emphasized that he was a genius; they both feared his disaffection and reprisals but could not understand what shape his formidable disapproval might take.

I’ve always tried to be someone else, live someone else’s life.

One thing I’m perfectly sure of is that I know what happened to my family a lot better than you do.” “Perhaps you just know one version of it better and that’s all.

“When men talk about the agony of being men,” she said, “they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.” “And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.”

“Maybe she told all the truth she could tell.”

Love would always come to me disguised in beauty, disfigured by softness. The world can do worse than make an enemy of your mother, but not much.

A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

In the hour it took to finish that meal, I learned that silence could be the most eloquent form of lying.

The boy is precious because he stands on the threshold of his generation and he is always afraid. The coach knows that 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.

I had always taken it for granted that people would like me. It was something I never worried about, but now I worried greatly.

I’m not as good without you. The world’s not as good.”

It was the last time I would ever make a move that required boldness or a leap of the imagination. I became tentative, suspicious, and dull. I learned to hold my tongue and mark my trail behind me and to look to the future with a wary eye. Finally, I was robbed of a certain optimism, that reckless acceptance of the world and all it could hand my way that had always been my strength and deliverance.

It’s a shame you have to be dying to know all this.”

“You’re smack in the middle of living an unexamined life and it’s going to catch up to you. That’s what I’m worried about.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I said to Savannah as we moved slowly past the Coast Guard base at the end of the Charleston peninsula. “I don’t,” Savannah answered, “but I believe in Luke and he believes in God and I always believe in God when I truly need him.” “Situational faith,” I said.

To our surprise, Savannah and I agreed that we had been born to the worst possible parents but we would have it no other way. On Marsh Hen Island while waiting for Luke, I think we began to forgive our parents for being exactly what they were meant to be.

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

He had never known that the selling of one’s own land and birthright for money was the sport of kings in America.

“I could only kill the innocent in Vietnam when I had the strongest country in the world backing me up. I realized early that unless you’re willing to kill the innocent, you can’t win. You can’t even be noticed.”

“Wholeness, Tom. It all comes back. It’s all a circle.”