Top 100 Conroy Quotes
#2. Pat Conroy embraced his new hometown with the grateful passion of a refugee.
William Grimes
#3. Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.
Pat Conroy
#4. I'd just like to thank everybody who was involved in the film, especially Brendan Gleeson and Ruaidhri Conroy. And Ruaidhri, I'm sorry that you couldn't be here tonight, but I hope next time they let you into the country.
Martin McDonagh
#5. Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses?
Pat Conroy
#6. 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
#8. Don't go yet. Please. Tell me a story, one about us. Tell what it meant. How on earth did it happen? The story, Pat - tell it to me.
Pat Conroy
#9. I can't form a total picture of things. Because I'm not her.
Frances Conroy
#10. A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
Pat Conroy
#11. Beneath the great sisterhood of stars unfurling in the night sky ...
Pat Conroy
#12. Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.
Pat Conroy
#13. Everyone is handed adversity in life. No one's journey is easy. It's how they handle it that makes people unique.
Kevin Conroy
#14. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.
Pat Conroy
#15. I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well.
Pat Conroy
#16. A breeze lifted off the ocean and several hundred notes from the wind chimes tinkled like ice shaken in silver cups. They altered the mood of the forest the way an orchestra does a theater when it begins tuning up its instruments.
Pat Conroy
#17. 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
#18. I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.
Pat Conroy
#19. A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she's tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.
Pat Conroy
#20. It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.
Pat Conroy
#22. 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
#23. I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.
Pat Conroy
#24. Scarlett (O'Hara) taught that one could be hungry and despairing, but not broken and not without resources, spiritual in nature, that precluded one from surrendering without a fight
Pat Conroy
#25. The Saudi government uses a lot of British equipment to suppress their own people. But we're happy for our politicians to go on advertising trips to Saudi, selling our weapons at the trade conventions.
Paul Conroy
#26. You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.
Pat Conroy
#27. Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
Pat Conroy
#28. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
Pat Conroy
#29. I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don't adhere.
Pat Conroy
#30. She had a grocer's faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.
Pat Conroy
#31. Good historical fiction can bring those sights, smells, and even the oppressive heat so alive, you feel that you are there,
Erin Brown Conroy
#32. I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.
Pat Conroy
#33. Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.
Pat Conroy
#34. I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.
Pat Conroy
#35. I never seemed to learn from joy; I earned my portion of wisdom through sadness.
Pat Conroy
#36. 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
#37. Because we're human. Like everyone else. And the older we get, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more painful everything becomes.
Pat Conroy
#38. Because I've gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.
Pat Conroy
#39. I'm sorry your bad dream died," I said as I left her and walked toward the gate. "And I'm sorry I ever met you, Annie Kate.
Pat Conroy
#40. She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.
Pat Conroy
#41. A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
Pat Conroy
#42. Do human beings have an infinite amount of energy with which to resist death? It is kinder and more accurate to say that they fought until they had no more fight left in them.
David L. Conroy
#43. 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
#44. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Pat Conroy
#45. I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.
Pat Conroy
#46. ...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand...
Pat Conroy
#47. Art is one of the few places where talent and madness can actually go to squirrel away inside each other.
Pat Conroy
#48. Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
Pat Conroy
#49. Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.
Pat Conroy
#50. ... it was but one of the things that made friendship with me an ambivalent enterprise.
Pat Conroy
#51. 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
#52. My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.
Pat Conroy
#53. Father made a fetish out of performing tasks the correct way. There was an efficiency and economy of his motions that I always found a pleasure to watch and a pain to mimic.
Pat Conroy
#54. She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.
Pat Conroy
#55. In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
Pat Conroy
#56. 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
#57. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.
Pat Conroy
#58. Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
Pat Conroy
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.
Pat Conroy
#63. If Henry Wingo had not been a violent man, I think he would have made a splendid father.
Pat Conroy
#64. I don't know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.
Pat Conroy
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.
Pat Conroy
#68. But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
Pat Conroy
#69. The words "I love you" could contain all the bloodthirsty despair of the abattoir, all the hopelessness of the most isolated, frozen gulag, all the lurid sadness of death row.
Pat Conroy
#70. Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
Pat Conroy
#71. I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.
Pat Conroy
#72. Writing has never been that simple for me.
Pat Conroy
#73. Single insincere phoneme, piss me off? Why can't I ignore her,
Pat Conroy
#74. Even if we accept the view that biochemical imbalances may contribute to depression and suicide, it is a mistake to assume that the biochemical aspect of the problem is entirely within the victim. It is also partly within the physiological makeup of the people around the suicide.
David L. Conroy
#75. Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.
Pat Conroy
#76. Some people ask me, Do they put aging makeup on you? It's just this very nice street makeup.
Frances Conroy
#77. To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.
Pat Conroy
#78. I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.
Pat Conroy
#79. Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
Pat Conroy
#80. There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
Pat Conroy
#81. I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic.
Pat Conroy
#82. They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull .
Pat Conroy
#83. Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.
Pat Conroy
#84. It's the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.
Pat Conroy
#85. I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.
Pat Conroy
#86. It was funny how we thought education to be the great gilded key which would solve all problems, eliminate all poverty and disease, eradicate differences between social classes, and bring the children of okra-planters up to par with the children of emperors.
Pat Conroy
#87. Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.
Pat Conroy
#88. Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name.
Pat Conroy
#89. One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
Pat Conroy
#90. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
Pat Conroy
#91. I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.
Pat Conroy
#92. Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that's me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.
Pat Conroy
#93. My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.
Pat Conroy
#94. I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.
Pat Conroy
#95. To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.
Pat Conroy
#96. that dressing room for an hour as my mother pretended to be making up her mind about buying that dress she could never afford. And from that day on we never saw her adorn her glorious hair with a single blossom, nor was she ever in our long childhood
Pat Conroy
#97. I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.
Pat Conroy
#98. I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class
Pat Conroy
#99. Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.
Pat Conroy
#100. It seemed to me that their love was based on their common need for order and mannerliness in their lives. Both had endured lives of chaos and incivility in their first marriages, and they provided each other with safe harbor at last. The town of Waterford had
Pat Conroy
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