01c. 1980 ADWhen we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
02c. 1980 ADI bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
03c. 1980 ADBasketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
04c. 1980 ADIf not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
05c. 1980 ADConroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, "the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
06c. 1980 ADBefore I met the Jesuits, I’d never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
07c. 1980 ADThe narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
08c. 1980 ADAs time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
10c. 1980 ADA man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
11c. 1980 ADI had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
12c. 1980 ADI told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'Pat Conroy / quote ↗
13c. 1980 ADWriting is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
14c. 1980 ADI became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
15c. 1980 ADI think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
