It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

Pat Conroy

Categorized in : Yankees Tacky Up North

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

south-carolina roles intellectual

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suf... by Pat Conroy

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

music hurt beautiful

Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The... by Pat Conroy

Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.

earth sound beach

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

century mistake feelings

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.

reading running book

... silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying. by Pat Conroy

... silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.

form silence lying

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

tongue eye expression

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

childhood parent father

Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.

black queens moving

Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.

media land art

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult. by Pat Conroy

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

south-carolina cult states

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

inspirational life travel

A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts. by Pat Conroy

A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.

living-things stories moving

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. by Pat Conroy

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

port geography tides

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

knowing-nothing passionate bottles

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.

museums book ideas

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified b... by Pat Conroy

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

evil law

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been. by Pat Conroy

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.

has-beens action

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

afternoon late august

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

army walks compassion