Beach Music Quotes

“The scampi tasted sweet like a lobster fed only on honey and it cut into the deep undertone of flavor deposited on the taste buds by the truffles.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“On its own, my spirit seemed to relax, like a folding chair let out by a pool.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“music as we danced our way in both”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“The past was one country where I tried to limit the number of free trips.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“In silence, we watched the water shimmer like a peacock's feather in that shining foil of soft tide in retreat.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“As boys, we learn to betray our future wives by mastering the subtle ways our mothers can be broken by our petulance and disapproval. My own mother provided me with all the weaponry I will ever need to ruin the life of any woman foolish enough to love me.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“admired the intransigence of their discipline, and in a century that seemed more ridiculous to me with each passing year, I thought that solitude and prayer and poverty might be the most eloquent and defensible response to these absurd times where alienation was both posture and philosophy.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“A squadron of brown pelicans flew overhead, their shape and wingspan so effortless in the morning air that their appearance seemed a quiet psalm in praise of flight itself. They passed over us like shadows stolen from the souls of other shadows.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Prologue In 1980, a year after my wife leapt to her death from the Silas Pearlman Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, I moved to Italy to begin life anew, taking our small daughter with me. Our sweet Leah was not quite two when my wife, Shyla, stopped her car on the highest point of the bridge and looked over, for the last time, the city she loved so well. She had put on the emergency brake and opened the door of our car, then lifted herself up to the rail of the bridge with the delicacy and enigmatic grace that was always Shyla’s catlike gift. She was also quick-witted and funny, but she carried within her a dark side that she hid with bright allusions and an irony as finely wrought as lace. She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself. It was nearly sunset and a tape of the Drifters’ Greatest Hits poured out of the car’s stereo. She had recently had our car serviced and the gasoline tank was full. She had paid all the bills and set up an appointment with Dr. Joseph for my teeth to be cleaned. Even in her final moments, her instincts tended toward the orderly and the functional. She had always prided herself in keeping her madness invisible and at bay; and when she could no longer fend off the voices that grew inside her, their evil set to chaos in a minor key, her breakdown enfolded upon her, like a tarpaulin pulled across that part of her brain where once there had been light. Having served her time in mental hospitals, exhausted the wide range of pharmaceuticals, and submitted herself to the priestly rites of therapists of every theoretic persuasion, she was defenseless when the black music of her subconscious sounded its elegy for her time on earth. On the rail, all eyewitnesses agreed, Shyla hesitated and looked out toward the sea and shipping lanes that cut past Fort Sumter, trying to compose herself for the last action of her life. Her beauty had always been a disquieting thing about her and as the wind from the sea caught her black hair, lifting it like streamers behind her,”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“It’s easier to be mean”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“in”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“made her unapproachable, apart. She was one of those girls who pass through your life leaving secret wreckage, but no visible wake. You remember her, but for all the wrong reasons.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“thought that, at birth, 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.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“One can do anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided with a passionate and gifted teacher.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“to worry about. But that’s not how it works. Pain doesn’t travel in straight lines. It circles back around and comes up behind you. It’s the circles that kill you.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“had the heart of a socialist and the soul of a missionary”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“It's dangerous to write about what you don't know," I said.
Ledare got up to go and said, "It's dangerous not to.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Though I had hated that war with my body and soul, I realized sitting there that Vietnam was still my war. I had blamed it for the great unraveling it had brought to America, the self-doubt, the breakdown of courtesy, the death of form, and the falling apart of all the old truths and the integrity of both law and institutions. Everything came up for grabs. Nothing survived the cut. The facile and the cheap became celebrated and the speech of idiots took on a benighted, kingly quality. Solidity was a concept found only in physics textbooks. Indifference took center stage and it was hard to believe”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“We returned that evening after making love in our hotel room. Afterward, we had held each other tightly, still surprised and shy by how high we could turn up the flame of that tender need we showed for each other’s bodies. At certain times in our lives, we crackled in the sheer electricity of our desire to be wonderful in bed. In strange cities, alone, we whispered things we would not tell another soul on earth. We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Guilt’s my mainstream,” I explained. “The central theme of my life. The Church laid a foundation of pure guilt inside me. They raised a temple in the soft center of a child. Floors were paved with guilt. Statues of saints were carved out of great blocks of it.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“out tomato”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“The Atlantic is a cheesy, second-rate ocean,” Jordan shouted back, but he was starting to judge the incoming waves again. “It would be okay if it had a hurricane come up the coast every day. But it’ll never be the Pacific. Now, you ride, Jack. See that fourth wave forming? Don’t be afraid when the bottom drops out of it. That’s the board entering the heart of the wave. Just rise to your knees on the first one. Remember, it’s all about surfaces.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“The mirror used to be my best friend. Now it is an assassin.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“found myself closing my eyes and walking the airy streets of Waterford made weightless by the buoyancy of my nostalgia.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“I always liked your piety, Jack.” “I’m a lot cuter than the women of your generation,” Betsy said, playing up to Capers and Mike. “Wrong, junior Leaguer.” I could feel myself turning mean. The cognac was doing its work and I felt the thrilling disquiet that had come into the room. I took Betsy’s measure, and went for her throat. “The women of my generation were the smartest, sexiest, most fascinating women ever to grow up in America. They started the women’s liberation movement, took to the streets in the sixties to stop the unbearably stupid Vietnam War. They fought their asses off for equal rights in the workplace, went to law school, became doctors, fought the corporate fight, and managed to raise children in a much nicer way than our mothers did.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Wasn't Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year?" "Yes, but the airport's perfectly safe.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“It's politics . . . It makes everybody stupid. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music