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Quote by Pat Conroy

“From the beginning, I’ve told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I’m the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.”

Quote by Pat Conroy

Book:A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
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Work

A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

This book is a compilation of reflective essays that delve into the author's journey and thoughts on the art of writing, offering a glimpse into the personal and professional aspects of a writer's life. more

Author

Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy was a renowned American author, born on October 26, 1945, and passed away on March 4, 2016. His works are known for their deep character portrayals and vivid Southern backgrounds, with notable titles including 'The Water Is Wide' and 'The Great Santini'. more

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“And I have begun thinking of that life as miraculous and lucky. How could a man I had dreaded as my commandant and who tried twice to get me kicked out of college become the subject of the first book I would write? [...] Who could have foreseen the day I would deliver his eulogy at the Summerall Chapel, or that I would give a speech on the night they named the dining room in the new Alumni Hall after him? Not me. Not once. Not ever.”

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“Once The Boo roamed this campus fierce, alert, and lion-voiced, and his wrath was a terrible thing. He could scream and rant and call us “bums” a thousand times, but he could not hide his clear and overwhelming love of the Corps. The Corps received that love, took it in, felt it in the deepest places, and now, tonight, we give it back at the school where we started out and we give it to The Boo, as a gift, because once, many years ago, The Boo loved us first, when we were cadets of boys and when we needed it the most.”

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“If Jim was back at the imaginary dinner party, trying to explain what he did for a living, he'd have tried to keep it simple: clearing involved everything that took place between the moment someone started at trade — buying or selling a stock, for instance — and the moment that trade was settled — meaning the stock had officially and legally changed hands. Most people who used online brokerages thought of that transaction as happening instantly; you wanted 10 shares of GME, you hit a button and bought 10 shares of GME, and suddenly 10 shares of GME were in your account. But that's not actually what happened. You hit the Buy button, and Robinhood might find you your shares immediately and put them into your account; but the actual trade took two days to complete, known, for that reason, in financial parlance as 'T+2 clearing.' By this point in the dinner conversation, Jim would have fully expected the other diners' eyes to glaze over; but he would only be just beginning. Once the trade was initiated — once you hit that Buy button on your phone — it was Jim's job to handle everything that happened in that in-between world. First, he had to facilitate finding the opposite partner for the trade — which was where payment for order flow came in, as Robinhood bundled its trades and 'sold' them to a market maker like Citadel. And next, it was the clearing brokerage's job to make sure that transaction was safe and secure. In practice, the way this worked was by 10:00 a.m. each market day, Robinhood had to insure its trade, by making a cash deposit to a federally regulated clearinghouse — something called the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC. That deposit was based on the volume, type, risk profile, and value of the equities being traded. The riskier the equities — the more likely something might go wrong between the buy and the sell — the higher that deposit might be. Of course, most all of this took place via computers — in 2021, and especially at a place like Robinhood, it was an almost entirely automated system; when customers bought and sold stocks, Jim's computers gave him a recommendation of the sort of deposits he could expect to need to make based on the requirements set down by the SEC and the banking regulators — all simple and tidy, and at the push of a button.”

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“In a BBC broadcast in 1934, when he was a year away from finishing The General Theory, Keynes pinpointed the fundamental difference between an approach to the Depression based on frictions and imperfections and an approach based on more fundamental defects in the market system: 'On the one side were those who believe that the existing economics system is, in the long run, a self-adjusting system though with creaks and groans and jerks, and interrupted by time-lags, outside interference and mistakes ... The strength of the self-adjusting school depends on its having behind it almost the whole body of organized thinking and doctrine of the last hundred years. If the heretics on the other side of the gulf [among whom Keynes included himself] are to demolish the forces of nineteenth century orthodoxy ... they must attack them in their citadel.”

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“While the exterior of the Citadel is formed of giant slabs of clear, bright ice, some of the interior walls are enhanced by having things frozen inside the ice, resulting in something like wallpaper. Stones suspended, as though forever in midfall. Bones, picked cleaned, occasionally used to form sculptures. Roses, their petals forever preserved in their full flowering. The room's walls have two faerie women frozen inside them, preserved so that they never decayed into moss and stone, like the rest of the Folk. Two faerie women, dressed in finery, crowns on their heads. The Hall of Queens.”

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