02c. 1980 ADEvil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
04c. 1980 ADBecause I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
05c. 1980 ADI was a watchful boy being raised by a father I didn’t admire. In a desperate way, I needed the guidance of someone who could show me another way of becoming a man. It was sometime during the year when I decided I would become the kind of man that Bill Dufford was born to be. I wanted to be the type of man that a whole town could respect and honor and fall in love with—the way Beaufort did when Bill Dufford came to town to teach and shape and turn its children into the best citizens they could be.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
06c. 1980 ADI’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
07c. 1980 ADWe had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
08c. 1980 ADThe body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
09c. 1980 ADI became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle classPat Conroy / quote ↗
10c. 1980 ADI wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
11c. 1980 ADit had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress .Pat Conroy / quote ↗
14c. 1980 ADI have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
15c. 1980 ADI do not think I was a hothead—not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
16c. 1980 ADI 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1980 ADComely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
19c. 1980 ADThe water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
21c. 1980 ADIt enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
22c. 1980 AD...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand...Pat Conroy / quote ↗
23c. 1980 ADWe old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
24c. 1980 ADIn sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
