trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
He penned some magnificent lines that rang true to those familiar with tidewater, marsh, the Low Country and the South.
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"She will die the way all old people in America die— of loneliness, boredom and neglect."
Pat Conroy
The Prince Of Tides
Boston, MA. 1986.
The Prince Of Tides
Boston, MA. 1986.
...At an early age, I had turned to reading as a way for the world to explain itself to me. Here, at last, I had stumbled into the store that would open up a hundred universities for my inspection. I had dropped out of nowhere and found myself at the gates of my my own personal Magdalen College in Oxford. Here I could punt down the Cam through the hallowed grounds of Cambridge University, take notes on Balzac at the Sorbonne, rush to my morning class on Dante in Bolongna, or sprint toward an honors class in Harvard Yard. The great writers of the world sang out in darkness and greeted me with the pleasure of my arrival...
...There have been hundreds of novels about the Civil War, but Gone With The Wind stands like an obelisk in the dead center of American letters casting its uneasy shadow over all of us. It hooked into the sweet-smelling attar that romance always lends to the cause of a shamed and defeated people. Millions of Southerners lamented the crushing defeat of the Southern armies, but only one had the talent to place that elegaic sense of dissolution on the white shoulders of the most irresistable, spiderous, seditious, and wonderful of American heroines, Scarlett O'Hara...
...There have been hundreds of novels about the Civil War, but Gone With The Wind stands like an obelisk in the dead center of American letters casting its uneasy shadow over all of us. It hooked into the sweet-smelling attar that romance always lends to the cause of a shamed and defeated people. Millions of Southerners lamented the crushing defeat of the Southern armies, but only one had the talent to place that elegaic sense of dissolution on the white shoulders of the most irresistable, spiderous, seditious, and wonderful of American heroines, Scarlett O'Hara...
-Pat Conroy
My Reading Life
New York, N.Y. 2010.
My Reading Life
New York, N.Y. 2010.
