People From Atlanta

"The drums ceased and the parade ground was as silent as an inland sea. At the other end of the parade ground, I heard Gauldin Grace's harsh, overextended voice screaming out the findings of the honor court. "Gentlemen, the honor court has met tonight and has found Pignetti, D.A., Company R, guilty of the honor code violation of stealing. His name will never be spoken by any man from Carolina Military Institute. He will never return to the campus so long as he may live. His name and memory are anathema to anyone who aspires to wear the ring. Let him go from us and never be heard from again. Let him begin the Walk of Shame.""

"Stories have always hunted me down, jumped out at me from the shadows, stalked me and sought me out, grabbed me by the shirtsleeves, and demanded my full attention. I’ve led a life chock-full of stories, and I know now that you have to be shifty and vigilant and ready to receive their incoming fire."

"When the ceremony was over, I found The Bear and handed him my diploma along with a ballpoint pen. "What's this for, lamb?" "I want you to sign it, Colonel. I want you to make it official," I answered. "I want the name of a man I can respect on my diploma, Colonel." He handed me back the diploma without signing it. "There already is, Bubba," he answered. "There already is." And he pointed to my name."

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

"The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean."

"When I was writing The Lords of Discipline, I went to The Boo for help. "What makes The Citadel different from all other schools? What makes it different, special and unique? Why do I think it is the best college in the world when I hated it when I was here, Boo? Help me with this." The Boo held up his hand and said, "It's the ring, Bubba. Always remember that. The ring, the ring, the ring." I thought about it for a moment then wrote the words, "I wear the ring." "How about this for a first line?" "Perfect, Bubba, just perfect.""

"Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is that they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing that they had taught me their larcenous skills well."

"During the entire period of my banishment and trial, I wanted to tell Piedmont and Bennington that what was happening between us was not confined to Beaufort, South Carolina. I wanted to tell them about the river that was rising quickly, flooding the marshes and threatening the dry land. I wanted them to know that their day was ending. When I saw them at the trial, I knew that they were the soldiers of the rear guard, captains of a doomed army retreating through the snow and praying that the quick, dark wolves, waiting in the cold, would come no closer. They were old men and could not accept the new sun rising out of the strange waters. The world was very different now."

"Teaching is a record of failures. But the glory of teaching is in the attempt."

"I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little."

"It was dangerous to have a sadist in the barracks, especially one who justified his excesses by religiously invoking the sacrosanct authority of the plebe system. The system contained its own high quotient of natural cruelty, and there was a very thin line between devotion to duty, that is, being serious about the plebe system, which was an exemplary virtue in the barracks, and genuine sadism, which was not. But I had noticed that in the actual hierarchy of values at the Institute, the sadist like Snipes rated higher than someone who took no interest in the freshmen and entertained no belief in the system at all. In the Law of the Corps it was better to carry your beliefs to an extreme than to be faithless. For the majority of the Corps, the only sin of the sadist was that he believed in the system too passionately and applied his belief with an overabundant zeal. Because of this, the barracks at all times provided a safe regency for the sadist and almost all of them earned rank. My sin was harder to figure. I did not participate at all in the rituals of the plebe system. Cruelty was easier to forgive than apostasy."

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

"Here is all I ask of a book—give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word."

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

"The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl."

"I would take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation. Scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocket knife, feed it to you from the shell and say, "There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood." I would say, "Breathe deeply," and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life. That bold aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk and spilled wine, all perfumed with sea water."

"I've never had anybody's approval, so I've learned to live without it."

"Everything that was wrong with me that night was my fault. I had tantalized the fates by embracing that life-defying trifecta: overeating, overdrinking, and lack of exercise. I'm trying to develop the appetite of a parakeet, drink nothing stronger than Clamato juice, and try to do aerobics in a Fripp Island pool as often as I can. When I enter the pool I look as though I'm trying out for a part as Moby Dick. It's not a pretty sight."

"I developed The Great Teacher theory late in my freshman year. It was a cornerstone of the theory that great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft; knowing what to steal and from whom."

"I wear the ring."

"I often tell people The Boo is "the worst book ever written by an American," and I wish I'd written it better."

"About the war between me and technology: it appears that technology is rolling over me like a blitzkrieg. I'm a victim of all its barbarisms. I still can't type, which makes my emails seem composed by a highlands baboon. Once or twice a week, I check my e-mail, whether I need to or not. I understand that most human beings check theirs with more frequency. Twitter is an unknown factor in my life and I've never seen Facebook, even though I'm told I have a presence on both of these entities. People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected for me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it. I can be frivolous without Twitter and Facebook. I turned sixty-five this year and I take old age seriously. There's work to be done."

"I have never had to look up a definition of honor. I knew instinctively what it was. It is something I had the day I was born, and I never had to question where it came from or by what right it was mine. If I was stripped of my honor, I would choose death as certainly and unemotionally as I clean my shoes in the morning. Honor is the presence of God in man."

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

"These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart."

"He left the same message every few months, the same message, word for word. "Bragg? This is Conroy. It is now obvious that it is up to me to keep this dying friendship alive. You do not write. You do not call. But I am willing to carry this burden by all by myself. It is a tragedy. Ours could have been a father-son relationship, but you rejected that. And now it is all up to me, to keep this dying [bleep, bleep, bleepity, bleeping] friendship from fading away..." And then there would be a second or two of silence, before: "I love you, son." That part always sounded real. I would always call back, immediately, but the voice mail just told me it was full, always full. I would learn, over decades, that it was full because I was not the only writer or friend he had adopted, or even the only one he left that same message of mock disappointment and feigned regret. But now and then I would actually be there when he called, and we would talk an hour or two about writers and language and why I should love my mother, and he would always, always tell me he had read my latest book, and how he was proud of me. Then he would tell me how he did not mind that I had neglected our friendship and that his broad shoulders could carry the weight of my indifference, and the phone would go dead. My God, I will miss that."

"Pat Conroy may have come to live among us involuntarily, but he stayed among us by choice and enriched us all for more than fifty years. Many of us saw ourselves reflected in his published words. Some of us he entertained grandly. Others of us he outraged greatly. To all of us, he gave a rare gift. He came to us from afar, like Faulkner and like Wolfe. But I respectfully suggest, in ways more real and more loving than either of them, that he gave to us the opportunity, in the phrase of Burns, "to see ourselves as others see us." For this alone, we should be forever grateful to Pat Conroy, our very own prince of tides. "Goodnight, sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2."

"Sports show you your limits. Sports teach humility. Sooner or later the athlete becomes humble no matter how good he is. But he plays until he has reached as high as he can."

"I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting."

"I envy the tireless intimacy of women's friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength."

"Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life."

"I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid."

"Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name."

"Not a single family finds itself exempt from that one haunted casualty who suffered irreparable damage in the crucible they entered at birth."

"Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them."

"I didn't get the point," said Pig. "That's because you've got four pounds of provolone where most people got brains!" Mark shouted, shaking his fist. "This is college, you dumb bastard. This is a place where you're supposed to argue and learn and get pissed off. You don't go around choking your buddies just because they don't happen to believe what you believe."

"I do not know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present."

"Throughout my career I've lived in constant fear that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I'd have nothing to say, that I’d be laughed at, humiliated—and I’m old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I'll ever write. As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I’m supposed to write—the grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don’t quite know it. But I trust I’ll begin to know it soon."

"There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss."

"Always believe in things and people that bring you pleasure. What good does it do to throw those things out the window?"

"Donald Patrick Conroy, born on October 26, 1945, was the best storyteller of our time - very possibly any time. We will never forget Donald Patrick Conroy. He came to live in South Carolina on orders of the United States Marine Corps. In 1961, his father, Colonel Donald Conroy, a Marine aviator who went by the nickname of the Great Santini- perhaps you've heard of him- received orders to report to the air station in Beaufort, South Carolina. Pat was sixteen years old and received this news with dread. He had been to ten schools in eleven years and Beaufort High School would become his third high school."

"I’m mad as hell. I woke up wanting to see the world burn yesterday, because I’m tired of seeing black men die. He casually put his knee on a human being’s neck for nine minutes as he died like a zebra in the clutch of a lion’s jaw... So that’s why children are burning it to the ground. They don’t know what else to do. And it is the responsibility of us to make this better right now. We don’t want to see one officer charged, we want to see four officers prosecuted and sentenced."

"As protests in Atlanta escalated toward looting and clashes with police, Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike appeared at the mayor’s press conference to deliver an emotional speech pleading with protestors not to vandalize their city. The rapper, the son of an Atlanta police officer, said that while he has “a lot of love and respect for police officers,” mentioning that police department’s “original eight” African-American officers in the 1940s. “Here we are 80 years later, and I watched a white officer assassinate a black man, and I know that tore your heart out” Killer Mike said."

"Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison"

"After I'm done with an album, I'm already thinking about the next. Watching the Michael Jordan [documentary "The Last Dance"] really helped me understand I'm not insane. In my mind, everybody's sleeping on me. That's what I tell myself to get myself ready. I'm like y'all motherfuckers still don't get how dope Run the Jewels is, and here the fuck we go again. I'm gonna feel like that every Run the Jewels record because I don't ever want to get complacent. I always want to push."

"They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror"

"They would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets"

"We don’t want to see targets burning, we want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burnt to the ground... I am duty-bound to be here to simply say: That it is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house, so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization. And now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize... It is time to beat up prosecutors you don’t like at the voting booth. It is time to hold mayoral offices accountable, chiefs and deputy chiefs. Atlanta is not perfect, but we’re a lot better than we ever were, and we’re a lot better than cities are."

"I love CNN… but I gotta say to CNN right now: Karma’s a mother. Stop feeding fear and anger every day. Stop making people feel so fearful and give them hope. I’m glad [protestors] only took down a sign and defaced a building, and they’re not killing human beings like that policeman did. I’m glad that they only destroyed some brick and mortar and they didn’t rip a father from a son, they didn’t rip a son from a mother, like the policeman did."

"I think the times are forever and always. The oligarchs are always making slaves of us. We're always resisting. Rome would have crumbled 200 years earlier if not for the circus. If there is no entertainment, if there is no distraction, or [people asking] what's the next fucking app? If none of that happens, and you're left to see the world for what it really is... raw. We're in a fucking jungle, all the time. Now because I happen to represent a group of people that happen to be on the lowest rung of that ladder, in the most brutal capitalistic system in the world, we always see the jungle. Even though you can distract yourself with [many things] the jungle is still fucking going on. What [happened this summer is] everybody started paying attention at the same time. Like Nina Simone said, "It's an artist duty to represent the times." I'm glad that the words [from the new album] are hitting people. But they're always true. Before Eric Garner and "I can't breathe" it was true. Post Eric Garner "I can't breathe" it's true. And unless we can do something to resist the state and its tyranny over us, using our fellow citizens as authority figures to the most brutal extent, those songs will always be relevant. It's just when the people choose to pay attention. That's the difference. There is no "going to the movies." There is no distracting yourself from what's going on right now because everybody is the fuck inside. I'm glad they got it."