The Prince of Tides Quotes

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― 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

“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.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

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

“The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“When men talk about the agony of being men, 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.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“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

“He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

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

“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, "Oh, Mama, do it again!" And I had my earliest memory.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“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.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils.

Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“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.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“But, as I watch this film, I often think that the boy did not know what he was really running toward, that it was not the end zone which awaited him. Somewhere in that ten second dash the running boy turned to metaphor and the older man could see it where the boy couldn not. He would be good at running, always good at it, and he would always run away from the things that hurt him, from the people who loved him, and from the friends empowered to save him. But where do we run when there are no crowds, no lights, no end zones? Where does a man run? the coach said, studying the films of himself as a boy. Where can a man run when he has lost the excuse of games? Where can a man run or where can he hide when he looks behind him and sees that he is only pursued by himself?”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“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

“There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He had not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town’s consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit’s harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. “That’s the Southern way” my grandmother said. “That’s the nice way.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“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.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

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

“Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides