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Mama Always Taught Her Children That Words Were Pretty, But Anyone Can Talk. She Said, Pay Attention To That Man Or Woman Who Acted, Who Did, Who Performed. She Taught Us To Trust In Thing We Could See, Not That We Heard.

-Pat Conroy

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Mama Always Taught Her

Pat Conroy

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Mama Always Taught Her Children That Words Were Pretty, But Anyone Can Talk. She Said, Pay Attention To That Man Or Woman Who Acted, Who Did, Who Performed. She Taught Us To Trust In Thing We Could See, Not That We Heard.

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The Fruit Tasted Foreign But Indigenous, Like Sunlight A Tree Had Changed Through Patience.

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But Even Her Demons She Invested With Inordinate Beauty, Consecrated Them With The Dignity Of Her Attention.

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I've Always Found Paranoia To Be A Perfectly Defensible Position.

I Had Come To A Place Where I Was Meant To Be. I Don't Mean Anything So Prosaic As A Sense Of Coming Home. This Was Different, Very Different. It Was Like Arriving At A Place Much Safer Than Home.

My Soul Found Ease And Rest In The Companionship Of Books.

Charleston Has A Landscape That Encourages Intimacy And Partisanship. I Have Heard It Said That An Inoculation To The Sights And Smells Of The Carolina Lowcountry Is An Almost Irreversible Antidote To The Charms Of Other Landscapes, Other Alien Geographies. You Can Be Moved Profoundly By Other Vistas, By Other Oceans, By Soaring Mountain Ranges, But You Can Never Be Seduced. You Can Even Forsake The Lowcountry, Renounce It For Other Climates, But You Can Never Completely Escape The Sensuous, Semitropical Pull Of Charleston And Her Marshes.

Mountain Ranges

In Families, There Are No Crimes Beyond Forgiveness.

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Fantasy Is One Of The Soul's Brighter Porcelains.

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.

We Wait For The Tortoises To Come. We Wait For That Lady Who Walks Them. That’s How Art Works. It’s Never A Jackrabbit, Or A Racehorse. It’s The Tortoises That Hold All The Secrets. We’ve Got To Be Patient Enough To Wait For Them.

A Recipe Is A Story That Ends With A Good Meal.

My Attraction To Story Is A Ceaseless Current That Runs Through The Center Of Me. My Inexhaustible Ardor For Reading Seems Connected To My Hunger For Storylines That Show Up In Both Books And In The Great Tumbling Chaos Of Life.

He Was One Of Those Rare Men Who Are Capable Of Being Fully In Love Only Once In Their Lives.

There Is No Teacher More Discriminating Or Transforming Than Loss.

Love Had Always Issued Out Of The Places That Hurt The Most.

My Mother Thought Of My Father As Half Barbarian And Half Blunt Instrument, And She Isolated Him From His Children.

(you) Don't Leave The Chicken To Watch The Feed.

Rape Is A Crime Against Sleep And Memory; It's Afterimage Imprints Itself Like An Irreversible Negative From The Camera Obscura Of Dreams.

I Would Always Be A Better Hater Of Things And Institutions Than A Lover Of Them.

Writing Poetry And Reading Books Causes Brain Damage.

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.

Her Laughter Was A Shiny Thing, Like Pewter Flung High In The Air.

I Was Born Into The Century In Which Novels Lost Their Stories, Poems Their Rhymes, Paintings Their Form, And Music Its Beauty, But That Does Not Mean I Have To Like That Trend Or Go Along With It.

Isn't It A Shame Military Doctors Couldn't Be As Good As Military Sunglasses?

There Are No Verdicts To Childhood, Only Consequences, And The Bright Freight Of Memory.

The World Of Literature Has Everything In It, And It Refuses To Leave

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American Men Are Allotted Just As Many Tears As American Women. But Because We Are Forbidden To Shed Them, We Die Long Before Women Do, With Our Hearts Exploding Or Our Blood Pressure Rising Or Our Livers Eaten Away By Alcohol Because That Lake Of Grief Inside Us Has No Outlet. We, Men, Die Because Our Faces Were Not Watered Enough.

Music Could Ache And Hurt, That Beautiful Music Was A Place A Suffering Man Could Hide.

The Pursuit Of Greatness Means That Laziness Has No Place In Your Life.

One Does Not Know Where Love Will Take You.

…then Another Porpoise Broke The Water And Rolled Toward Us. A Third And Fourth Porpoise Neared. The Visitation Was Something So Rare And Perfect That We Knew By Instinct Not To Speak—and Then As Quickly As They Had Come, The Porpoises Moved Away From Us…each Of Us Would Remember That All During Our Lives. It Was The Purest Moment Of Freedom And Headlong Exhilaration That I Had Ever Felt. A Wordless Covenant Was Set, And I Would Go Back In My Imagination, And Return To Where Happiness Seemed So Easy To Touch.

Through Sports A Coach Can Offer A Boy A Secret Way To Sneak Up On The Mystery That Is Manhood.

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.

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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.

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Why Do They Not Teach You That Time Is A Finger Snap And An Eye Blink, And That You Should Not Allow A Moment To Pass You By Without Taking Joyous, Ecstatic Note Of It, Not Wasting A Single Moment Of Its Swift, Breakneck Circuit?

Live In The Moment

Families Without Songs Are Unhappy Families.

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