Top 100 Pat Conroy Quotes
#1. Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses?
Pat Conroy
#2. There's the neurotic mother who's so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters.
Pat Conroy
#3. Son, you can do more good at Yamacraw than you could ever do in the Peace Corps. And you would be helping Americans, Pat. And I, for one, think it's very important to help Americans.
Pat Conroy
#4. We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.
Pat Conroy
#5. I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.
Pat Conroy
#6. I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.
Pat Conroy
#7. I never seemed to learn from joy; I earned my portion of wisdom through sadness.
Pat Conroy
#8. Like many men and women who make egregious and irretrievable mistakes with their own children, she would redeem herself by becoming the perfect grandmother.
Pat Conroy
#9. Somewhere, the billion dreams of the town since its origin stirred in a maelstrom far from the reach of the shrimpers' nets. Old dreams still burned with the power of their one night on earth, but burned deep and forbidden in regions denied to men.
Pat Conroy
#10. Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.
Pat Conroy
#11. No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.
Pat Conroy
#12. In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
Pat Conroy
#13. My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
Pat Conroy
#14. My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own.
Pat Conroy
#15. I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course.
Pat Conroy
#16. It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what 'tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.
Pat Conroy
#17. Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science.
Pat Conroy
#18. A portion of guilt is standard issue for southern boys; our whole lives are convoluted, egregious apologies to our mothers because our fathers have made us such flawed husbands.
Pat Conroy
#19. They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull .
Pat Conroy
#20. I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.
Pat Conroy
#21. Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.
Pat Conroy
#22. Great romantics are granted lots of slack.
Pat Conroy
#23. The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
Pat Conroy
#24. I've never had anyone's approval, so I've learned to live without it.
Pat Conroy
#25. I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
Pat Conroy
#26. Those wishing to be successful in the market can't ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have.
Pat Conroy
#27. The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.
Pat Conroy
#28. A perspicacious lad, Mr. McLean. A perspicacious swine, indeed.
Pat Conroy
#29. If I catch a fish before the sun rises, I have connected myself again to the deep hum of the planet. If I turn on the television because I cannot stand an evening alone with myself or my family, I am admitting my citizenship with the living dead.
Pat Conroy
#30. Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.
Pat Conroy
#31. I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.
Pat Conroy
#32. Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
Pat Conroy
#33. In twenty feet of water, ... the four of us watched the moonlight play on the surface of the water. It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass.
Pat Conroy
#34. I envy the tireless intimacy of women's friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.
Pat Conroy
#35. You would think he was somebody the way he carries on. My God, he's from Spartanburg. Spartanburg of all the pitiful places. The upcountry. The goddam, no-count upcountry.
Pat Conroy
#36. There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
Pat Conroy
#37. Again, I know that story is suspect in the high precincts of American fiction, but only because it brings entertainment and pleasure, the same responses that have always driven puritanical spirits at the dinner table wild when the talk turns to sexual intercourse and incontinence.
Pat Conroy
#38. Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.
Pat Conroy
#39. I never read my reviews ... not even the good ones. Barbra Streisand once told me, if just one person in the audience doesn't applaud, it bothers her. I'm the same way. I'd be devastated to read that someone didn't like my work.
Pat Conroy
#40. My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
Pat Conroy
#41. The wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.
Pat Conroy
#42. The two fountains spoke to each other in the pretty speech of falling water ...
Pat Conroy
#43. The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask.
Pat Conroy
#44. I'm not mentally ill," she insisted, fidgeting in her chair. "I'm just very neurotic and I'm always falling in love with assholes.
Pat Conroy
#45. I was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities.
Pat Conroy
#46. I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself. (201)
Pat Conroy
#47. Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
Pat Conroy
#48. My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
Pat Conroy
#49. Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.
Pat Conroy
#50. I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.
Pat Conroy
#51. And I was glad she had the camera as a fence to protect herself, an excuse to be invisible. Cameras are a lifesaver for the very shy people who have nowhere else to hide.
Pat Conroy
#52. Upstaged by a schizophrenic, Dallas said. The story of my life.
Pat Conroy
#53. The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest.
Pat Conroy
#54. Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.
Pat Conroy
#55. 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.
Pat Conroy
#56. The forlorn appearance assumed by all houses that have lost their people.
Pat Conroy
#57. Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.
Pat Conroy
#58. We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.
Pat Conroy
#59. Man wonders but God decides
When to kill the Prince of Tides.
Pat Conroy
#60. She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
Pat Conroy
#61. A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
Pat Conroy
#62. The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
Pat Conroy
#63. There's no word in the language I revere more than 'teacher.' My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I've honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
Pat Conroy
#64. I WOULD NOT HAVE RETURNED TO this year of 1966 if I had not experienced one of those life-changing encounters on the road that rise up periodically to let us know that fate remains inexorable in its utter strangeness and its capacity for astonishment. At
Pat Conroy
#65. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy.
Pat Conroy
#66. The most powerful words in English are, Tell me a story.
Pat Conroy
#67. All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.
Pat Conroy
#68. She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
Pat Conroy
#69. She wore defeat like a piece of cheap jewelry. "Worshiping them. Anointing them with oil, Mrs. Gervais," I said.
Pat Conroy
#70. You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It's a vicious cycle.
Pat Conroy
#71. You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.
Pat Conroy
#72. When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
Pat Conroy
#73. I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown.
Pat Conroy
#74. Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
Pat Conroy
#75. My folks wouldn't read a book if you put a gun to their dicks. but they read people all day long and always get it right.
Pat Conroy
#76. Take the local, take the express, don't get off till you reach success
Sidney Rosen (Prince Of Tides)
Pat Conroy
#77. Mother, with her upbringing in the primitive Baptist church, believed that converting to Roman Catholicism was a step upward in the social order. Of course she was wrong; when I grew up in the South, a Roman Catholic was the weirdest thing you could be.
Pat Conroy
#78. The American male is a quivering mass of insecurities. If a woman makes the mistake of loving him, he will make her suffer terribly for her utter lack of taste.
Pat Conroy
#79. Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.
Pat Conroy
#80. I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.
Pat Conroy
#81. My mother saw in 'Gone With the Wind' the text of liberating herself, ... She took 'Gone With the Wind' as the central book in her life, and made it the central book in her family.
Pat Conroy
#82. Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
Pat Conroy
#83. Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.
Pat Conroy
#84. The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
Pat Conroy
#85. It all makes more sense when I'm out here alone," he smiled. "I can talk myself into anything.
Pat Conroy
#86. When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, Is this necessary at this point in the book?
Pat Conroy
#87. The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing.
Pat Conroy
#88. Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.
Pat Conroy
#89. A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.
Pat Conroy
#90. Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.
Pat Conroy
#91. I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.
Pat Conroy
#92. Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'
Pat Conroy
#93. An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.
Pat Conroy
#94. San Francisco is a city that requires a fine pair of legs, a city of cliffs misnamed as hills, honeycombed with a fine webbing of showy houses that cling to the slanted streets with the fierceness of abalones.
Pat Conroy
#95. There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
Pat Conroy
#96. I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
Pat Conroy
#97. I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.
Pat Conroy
#98. Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
Pat Conroy
#99. 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.
Pat Conroy
#100. When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
Pat Conroy
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