The Lords of Discipline

My second favorite book by Pat Conroy, after My Losing Season.

Here are the lines that stood out to me when I read it last summer while I was volunteering in Alabama:


"helpless to translate the murmurings of the inarticulate lover I felt screaming from within."

"Honor is the presence of God in man."

"...stars spoke the language of light years"

"There's this delayed reaction for all my emotions."

"I will speak from memory - my memory - a memory that is all refracting light slanting through prisms and dreams, a shifting, troubled riot of electrons charged with pain and wonder. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself."

"We came...from cruciform towns with a single intersection..."

"...it was obvious that they loved each other very much. It was good to be around them, and I studied how people were required to act when they were in love so I would know the forms and nuances of that sweet delirium if and when it happened to me."

"Do everything well...leave nothing to chance. There was no such thing as an insignificant detail, and everything has a name."

"Athletes have a strange but genuine compulsion to touch each other's asses."

"But it was my destiny and my character not to be able to recall the exact feeling, the exact one, of those brief seconds."

"You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you. So did this quest."