Benjamin

“Not a single family finds itself exempt from that one haunted casualty who suffered irreparable damage in the crucible they entered at birth. Where some children can emerge from conditions of soul-killing abuse and manage to make their lives into something of worth and value, others can’t limp away from the hurts and gleanings time decanted for them in flawed beakers of memory.”
― Pat Conroy, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son

“The crimes of a father or the carelessness of a mother can defile the taste of oyster dressing and giblet gravy on the brightest Thanksgiving Day. Birthday parties are an abomination. I hated them even when I was a child, especially mine. Long ago, I decided I liked funerals far more than I did weddings. The pretense of being festive at these events is both crushing and debilitating to me. Feigned happiness and forced bonhomie take a toll on my spirit that deflates me for a week.”
― Pat Conroy, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son

“In the days leading up to the passage of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act of 2010), I listened on the radio to ‘a town hall’. ‘I happen to be an American,’ said a woman in the audience, her voice yodelling and hiccuping with emotion, ‘and I don’t want to live in a country like the Soviet Union!’ Or, she might have said, a country (at last) beginning (at least) to emulate Canada, Australia, and all the constituent states of the EU. But in the US saying ‘like Europe’, or ‘like England’, or ‘like France’, or ‘like Switzerland’, is the rough equivalent of saying ‘like the Soviet Union’ – which disappeared for ever in 1991.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“As far as I can tell, every family produces its solitary misfit, its psychotic mirror image of all the ghosts summoned out of the small or large hells of childhood, the spiller of the apple cart, the jack of spades, the black-hearted knight, the shit stirrer, the sibling with the uncontrollable tongue, the father brutal by habit, the uncle who tried to feel up his nieces, the aunt too neurotic ever to leave home.”
― Pat Conroy, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son