Pat Conroy quotes
My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn't easy.
My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.
The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement.