Quotes from the ‘The Prince of Tides’

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” (The book’s first line)

“There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.”

“The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.”

“A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.”

“I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class.”

“There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. ... I betray the integrity of my family’s history by turning everything, even sadness, into romance. There is no romance in this story; there is only the story.”

“Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.”

“It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.”

“The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.”

“If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.”

“In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.”

“A portion of guilt is standard issue for Southern boys; our whole lives are convoluted, egregious apologies to our mothers because our fathers have made us such flawed husbands.”

“Her poetry moved through streams of time, wild and rambunctious, like an old man entering the boundary waters of the Savannah River, planning to water-ski forty miles to prove he was still a man.”

“In every Southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.”

“She had a grocer’s faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.”

“The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our home by the river.”

“I realized early that unless you’re willing to kill the innocent, you can’t win.”

“As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.”

“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.”

“They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull.”

“... thought you didn’t believe in God,” I said to Savannah as we moved slowly past the Coast Guard base at the end of the Charleston peninsula. ‘I don’t,’ Savannah answered, ‘but I believe in Luke and he believes in God and I always believe in God when I truly need him.’ ‘Situational faith,’ I said.”

This story was originally published March 5, 2016 at 8:46 PM with the headline "Quotes from the ‘The Prince of Tides’."