I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.
I don’t know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.
I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization.
We Shall Overcome” by Pete Seeger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit.
Without my knowledge, the mooncalf bedlam of Ireland had filled me with an incurable anxiety, an uncontrollable temper, a tendency to abuse alcohol, a stubbornness I found both repellent and incurable, and a tendency to always think I’m right. What a screwed up legacy this hard-hearted Ireland left to me.
If Henry Wingo had not been a violent man, I think he would have made a splendid father.
Good taste is not something you can be taught. It’s not something you obtain in a store or go to college to learn.
To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.
My own tears seemed landlocked and frozen in a glacier I could not reach or touch within me.
My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.
I do not think I was a hothead – not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life.
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 to 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.
Think instead about children. People. Human beings. Feel for once that education is about people – not figures.
Humor has always been the redemptive angel in the Conroys’s sad history. With this family, I shall never grow hungry from lack of material.
Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts – the ability and willingness to change his mind and do it in an orderly, well-reasoned way.
The choices I didn’t make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.
She had camouflaged the vinegar factory in her character with a great honeycomb along the sills and porches of her public self.
Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that’s me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.
This room had long served as a retreat from the disharmony and sadness of the first floor, and it was here I had fallen in love with these books and authors in a way that only lifelong readers know and understand. A good movie had never once affected me in the same life-changing way a good book could. Books had the power to alter my view of the world forever. A good movie could change my perceptions for a day.