Pat Conroy Quotes

The full moon hung low, a fresh coin that threw its silver grandly on the water in a ribbon that dazzled for a thousand miles.

In silence, we watched the water shimmer like a peacock's feather in that shining foil of soft tide in retreat.

I have never had to look up a definition of honor. I knew instinctively what it was. It is something I had the day I was born, and I never had to question where it came from or by what right it was mine. If I was stripped of my honor, I would choose death as certainly and unemotionally as I clean my shoes in the morning. Honor is the presence of God in man.

The Citadel cherishes the belief that the more hardship endured by the young man, the higher the quality of the person who graduates from the system. The Citadel devised a formula years ago to improve the quality of men who walked through her gates. The formula begins with the plebe system. One thing is certain. The plebe system is calculated to be, and generally succeeds in being, a nine month journey through hell. The freshman is beaten, harassed, ridiculed, and humiliated by the upperclassmen who concur and believe in the traditions of the school. Under the pressure of this system, the freshman, in theory, becomes hardened to the savage hardships of the world. Life is tough, the system says, and we are going to make life so tough for you this year that when your marriage dissolves, your child dies unexpectedly, or your platoon is decimated in a surprise attack, you can never say The Citadel didn't prepare you for the worst in life.

One can do anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided with a passionate and gifted teacher.

The Southern school superintendent is a kind of remote deity who breathes the purer air of Mount Parnassus. The teachers see him only on those august occasions when they need to be reminded of the nobility of their calling. The powers of a superintendent are considerable. He hires and fires, manipulates the board of education, handles a staggering amount of money, and maintains the precarious existence of the status quo.

I would take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation. Scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocket knife, feed it to you from the shell and say, "There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood." I would say, "Breathe deeply," and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life. That bold aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk and spilled wine, all perfumed with sea water.

I do not know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

The South of humanity and goodness is slowly rising out of the fallen temple of hatred and white man's nationalism. The town retains her die-hards and nigger-haters and always will. Yet they grow older and crankier with each passing day. When Beaufort digs another four hundred holes in her plentiful grave-yards, deposits there the rouged and elderly corpses, and covers them with the sandy, lowcountry soil, then another whole army of the Old South will be silenced and not heard from again. The religion of the Confederacy and apartheid will one day be subdued by the passage of years. The land will be the final arbiter of human conflict; no matter how intense the conflict, the victory of earth and grave will be complete.

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.

About the war between me and technology: it appears that technology is rolling over me like a blitzkrieg. I'm a victim of all its barbarisms. I still can't type, which makes my emails seem composed by a highlands baboon. Once or twice a week, I check my e-mail, whether I need to or not. I understand that most human beings check theirs with more frequency. Twitter is an unknown factor in my life and I've never seen Facebook, even though I'm told I have a presence on both of these entities. People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected for me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it. I can be frivolous without Twitter and Facebook. I turned sixty-five this year and I take old age seriously. There's work to be done.

When we talk about the aviators who raised us and the Marines who loved us, we can look you in the eye and say, "you would not like to have been American's enemies when our fathers passed overhead." We were raised by the men who made the United States of America the safest country on earth in the bloodiest century in all recorded history. Our fathers made sacred those strange, singing names of battlefields across the Pacific: Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh and a thousand more. We grew up attending the funerals of Marines slain in these battles. Your fathers made communities like Beaufort decent and prosperous and functional; our fathers made the world safe for democracy.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

How could a man I had dreaded as my commandant and who tried twice to get me kicked out of college become the subject of the first book I would write? How could the young kid I was then become one of the closest friends The Boo would ever make? Who could have predicted that The Boo would be hired as the mighty advisor for the filming of The Lords of Discipline in England? After his long humiliation and exile by The Citadel, who would have predicted that he and I would both be honored by a full-dress parade and honorary degrees as we stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the same parade ground we had marched on as boys? Who could have foreseen the day I would deliver his eulogy at the Summerall Chapel, or that I would give a speech on the night they named the dining room in the new Alumni Hall after him? Not me. Not once. Not ever.

When the ceremony was over, I found The Bear and handed him my diploma along with a ballpoint pen. "What's this for, lamb?" "I want you to sign it, Colonel. I want you to make it official," I answered. "I want the name of a man I can respect on my diploma, Colonel." He handed me back the diploma without signing it. "There already is, Bubba," he answered. "There already is." And he pointed to my name.