Top 100 Pat Conroy Quotes

#1. Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses?

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #14679
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #18463
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #83012
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #105591
#5. I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #114589
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #166458
#7. I never seemed to learn from joy; I earned my portion of wisdom through sadness.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #170764
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #172974
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #201887
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #231091
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #242911
#12. In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #251591
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #253561
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #264212
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #264673
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #265039
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #281008
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #282695
#19. They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull .

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #328899
#20. I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #377996
#21. Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #384203
#22. Great romantics are granted lots of slack.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #422478
#23. The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #429998
#24. I've never had anyone's approval, so I've learned to live without it.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #446356
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #447105
#26. Those wishing to be successful in the market can't ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #471114
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #475035
#28. A perspicacious lad, Mr. McLean. A perspicacious swine, indeed.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #476701
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #478272
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #541065
#31. I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #554551
#32. Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #606029
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #608975
#34. I envy the tireless intimacy of women's friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #640214
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #657202
#36. There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #674138
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #679252
#38. Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #759933
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #762965
#40. My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #764046
#41. The wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #765316
#42. The two fountains spoke to each other in the pretty speech of falling water ...

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #802177
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #819911
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #843612
#45. I was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #856663
#46. I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself. (201)

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #859583
#47. Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #866791
#48. My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #877637
#49. Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #884610
#50. I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #913874
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #955809
#52. Upstaged by a schizophrenic, Dallas said. The story of my life.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #981939
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #997260
#54. Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #997674
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1012301
#56. The forlorn appearance assumed by all houses that have lost their people.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1030968
#57. Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1038254
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1045864
#59. Man wonders but God decides
When to kill the Prince of Tides.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1059025
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1079725
#61. A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1081505
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1106606
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1175360
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1181499
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1188337
#66. The most powerful words in English are, Tell me a story.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1193850
#67. All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1213867
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1250739
#69. She wore defeat like a piece of cheap jewelry. "Worshiping them. Anointing them with oil, Mrs. Gervais," I said.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1257152
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1262592
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1309660
#72. When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1325535
#73. I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1330850
#74. Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1335578
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1363660
#76. Take the local, take the express, don't get off till you reach success
Sidney Rosen (Prince Of Tides)

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1383238
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1383256
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1393444
#79. Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1405742
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1406908
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1412789
#82. Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1419444
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1435162
#84. The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1492971
#85. It all makes more sense when I'm out here alone," he smiled. "I can talk myself into anything.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1498994
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1509701
#87. The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1523182
#88. Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1568998
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1588084
#90. Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1600865
#91. I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1608597
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1611730
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1653763
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1656123
#95. There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1667399
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1668491
#97. I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Quotes #1676105
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1744797
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1794083
#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

Pat Conroy Quotes #1815212

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