Becky Walsh > Becky's Quotes

“Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.”
― Pat Conroy

“We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Her view of men was one-dimensional, but not inaccurate: men were prisoners of their genitalia and women were the keepers of the keys to paradise.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“My mother saw in 'Gone With the Wind' the text of liberating herself, ... She took 'Gone With the Wind' as the central book in her life, and made it the central book in her family.”
― Pat Conroy

“She had a grocer's faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the safe protectorate of his soft, uncritical maleness, I never wholly appreciated him. I did not know how to cherish sanctity, and I had no way of honoring, of giving small voice to the praise of such natural innocence, such a generous simplicity. Now I know that a part of me would like to have traveled the world as he traveled it, a jester of burning faith, a fool and a forest prince brimming with the love of God. I would like to walk his southern world, thanking God for oysters and porpoises, praising God for birdsongs and sheet lightning, and seeing God reflected in pools of creekwater and the eyes of stray cats. I would like to have talked to yard dogs and tanagers as if they were my friends and fellow travelers along the sun-tortured highways, intoxicated with a love of God, swollen with charity like a rainbow, in the thoughtless mingling of its hues, connecting two distant fields in its glorious arc. I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and a tongue fluent only in praise.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Man wonders but God decides
When to kill the Prince of Tides.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides