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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
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
As we took the court for the second half, I made a secret now to myself that I would never listen to a single thing that Mel Thompson said to me again. I would obey him and honor him and follow him, but I would not let him touch the core of me again. He was my coach, but I was my master. -- Pat Conroy
Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert. -- Pat Conroy
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
She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs. -- Pat Conroy
Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit? -- Pat Conroy
But let me begin with a statement of my own passionate and indignant belief
I do not care one goddamned thing about how James Dickey conducted his personal life. I care everything about what this man wrote on blank sheets of paper when he sat alone probing the extremities of imagination. -- Pat Conroy
Words are pretty, but anyone can talk. Pay attention to the people who perform. -- Pat Conroy
There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous. -- Pat Conroy
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
I mourn for the quicksilvery racehorse passage of time. Its swiftness has caught me with the same ineffable start that comes to every man and woman who lives long enough. It remains as the single great surprise of any life. In -- Pat Conroy
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
A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who dies not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission should write book reviews, editorials, or health-insurance policies instead. -- Pat Conroy
I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me. -- Pat Conroy
But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
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
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
Even then, her interior life was far more important to her than her external one. -- Pat Conroy
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
Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
life was good, but it was hard; we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the preparation. -- Pat Conroy
Single insincere phoneme, piss me off? Why can't I ignore her, -- Pat Conroy
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
It's the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much. -- Pat Conroy
Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up. -- Pat Conroy
Humor has always been the redemptive angel in the Conroys's sad history. With this family, I shall never grow hungry from lack of material. -- Pat Conroy
What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts -- Pat Conroy
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
You're worried about your mother dying, aren't you," Leah said, putting her cheek on my forearm. "I can tell."
For a moment I hesitated, but I could hear the call for intimacy in her voice, the desire for me to let her enter those grottoes where I tended my own fear of my mother's illness. -- Pat Conroy
The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly. -- Pat Conroy
Though I felt like a voyeur to some kind of disaster, my eyes were riveted to the scene ... -- Pat Conroy
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
It both surprised and angered me that {they} had reached a consensus of agreement against me. The way I looked at the world, enemies criticized and friends affirmed. -- Pat Conroy
I was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities. -- Pat Conroy
A library could show you everything if you knew where to look. -- Pat Conroy
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
The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are. -- Pat Conroy
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
I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little. -- Pat Conroy
A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal. -- Pat Conroy
I loved my parents ... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood. -- Pat Conroy
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
I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange. -- Pat Conroy
It was a time in my life when many things bored me deeply and I hungered for beauty and those realms of pure elation granted to those who had the imagination to know what to look for and how to find it. -- Pat Conroy
I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me. -- Pat Conroy
Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air. -- Pat Conroy
The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing. -- Pat Conroy
I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me. -- Pat Conroy
I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once. -- Pat Conroy
Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine. -- Pat Conroy
You're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world. -- Pat Conroy
I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell. -- Pat Conroy
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
I reveled in class discussion and the Socratic method of drawing substance out of calcified minds untrained to think. -- Pat Conroy
...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand... -- Pat Conroy
Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else. -- Pat Conroy
In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness. -- Pat Conroy
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
Gonzaga was the kind of place you'd not even think about loving until you'd left it for a couple of years. -- Pat Conroy
There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help. -- Pat Conroy
Beneath the great sisterhood of stars unfurling in the night sky ... -- Pat Conroy
I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
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
We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game. -- Pat Conroy
When I was in a kitchen I could no longer feel the pressure of the world on my shoulders; for me cooking has always been a high form of play, and teaching someone how to make a meal memorable was a combination of thrill and gift that I never tired of giving. -- Pat Conroy
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
There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art. -- Pat Conroy
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
Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself. -- Pat Conroy
My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn't easy. -- Pat Conroy
Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance. -- Pat Conroy
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
Beneficent realization that he was a stranger no longer, that he belonged -- Pat Conroy
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
Help them, but don't make friends with them. -- Pat Conroy
Everyone was surprised and enraged by the usurpation of this inalienable Caucasian right to park one's ass on a leather stool and drink a Coke. -- Pat Conroy
The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism. -- Pat Conroy
She had camouflaged the vinegar factory in her character with a great honeycomb along the sills and porches of her public self. -- Pat Conroy
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
realized his wounds had enhanced his manhood and his own sense of himself. -- Pat Conroy
That's what a good book does-it puts readers on their knees. It makes you want to believe in a world you just read about-the one that will make you feel different about the world you thought you lived in, the world that will never be the same. -- Pat Conroy
Because our nation is stupid and Hollywood is coarse, there is no one to tell us of the deep and extraordinary beauty of older women. I now see them all around me and am filled with a fierce joy that one of them has come to live in my house. -- Pat Conroy
The two fountains spoke to each other in the pretty speech of falling water ... -- Pat Conroy
As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers. -- Pat Conroy
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
One noteworthy thing about South Carolina is the quality of school-bus drivers in the state. To qualify for a bus license one must have reached puberty and be able to recite the alphabet without stuttering. -- Pat Conroy
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
I never seemed to learn from joy; I earned my portion of wisdom through sadness. -- Pat Conroy
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
Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise. -- Pat Conroy
We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That's how art works. It's never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It's the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We've got to be patient enough to wait for them. -- Pat Conroy
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
Always believe in things and people that bring you pleasure. What good does it do to throw those things out the window? -- Pat Conroy
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
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
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
Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry. -- Pat Conroy
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
Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts - the ability and willingness to change his mind and do it in an orderly, well-reasoned way. -- Pat Conroy
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
I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win. -- Pat Conroy
Those wishing to be successful in the market can't ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have. -- Pat Conroy
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
Art is one of the few places where talent and madness can actually go to squirrel away inside each other. -- Pat Conroy
I don't know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present. -- Pat Conroy
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
He lived out his whole life as an anthem to the pleasures of a bad mood. -- Pat Conroy
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
. . . the hardships and perils that eat around the edges of even the strongest loves. -- Pat Conroy
When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other. -- Pat Conroy
Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands. -- Pat Conroy
She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself. -- Pat Conroy
Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief. -- Pat Conroy
According to Margaret Mitchell, the Civil War destroyed a civilization of unsurpassable amenity, chivalry, and grace. -- Pat Conroy
I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself. (201) -- Pat Conroy
My own tears seemed landlocked and frozen in a glacier I could not reach or touch within me. -- Pat Conroy
The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man. -- Pat Conroy
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
I dislike poor teachers. They are criminals to me. I've seen so much cruelty toward children. I've seen so many children not given the opportunity to live up to their potential as human beings. -- Pat Conroy
Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains. -- Pat Conroy
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
I had loved studying the map because it was a printed explanation of where I had been placed on earth. It was a love song to location, a psalm of praise to both measurement and extent. -- Pat Conroy
My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books. -- Pat Conroy
The scampi tasted sweet like a lobster fed only on honey and it cut into the deep undertone of flavor deposited on the taste buds by the truffles. -- Pat Conroy
I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.' -- Pat Conroy
I'm an American male, Lowenstein," I said, smiling. "It's not my job to be open." "What exactly is the American male's job?" she asked. "To be maddening. To be unreadable, controlling, bull-headed, and insensitive," I said. -- Pat Conroy
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
A perspicacious lad, Mr. McLean. A perspicacious swine, indeed. -- Pat Conroy
music as we danced our way in both -- Pat Conroy
Some things don't mix. Some things don't mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk. -- Pat Conroy
And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times. -- Pat Conroy
When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome. -- Pat Conroy
Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I remain her enthusiast, her evangelist, her acolyte, and her grateful student. She taught me that cooking and storytelling make the most delightful coconspirators. -- Pat Conroy
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
They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull . -- Pat Conroy
I could rent Caesar out at birthday parties. Halloween parties. I could take pictures of Caesar eating a piece of birthday cake. Or a picture of a kid riding Caesar on his birthday. We could build a saddle. -- Pat Conroy
I went up to the terrace again and looked out on the tawny, many-alleyed city. At night it looked carved from brown sugar. -- Pat Conroy
Great romantics are granted lots of slack. -- Pat Conroy
If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float. -- Pat Conroy
I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.' -- Pat Conroy
Perfect doesn't just mean happy. Perfect can have lots of different parts. - Niles. -- Pat Conroy
Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage. -- Pat Conroy
I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one, -- Pat Conroy
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
Humanity is best described as inhumanity. -- Pat Conroy
I want to be lovely in death... -- Pat Conroy
I've always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious. -- Pat Conroy
No man or woman has the right to humiliate children, even in the sacrosanct name of education. No one has the right to beat children with leather straps, even under the sacred auspices of all school boards in the world. -- Pat Conroy
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
The wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me. -- Pat Conroy
Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay. -- Pat Conroy
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
It ratified a theory of mine that great writing could sneak up on you, master of a thousand disguises: prodigal kinsman, messenger boy, class clown, commander of artillery, altar boy, lace maker, exiled king, peacemaker, or moon goddess. -- Pat Conroy
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
My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art. -- Pat Conroy
I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara. -- Pat Conroy
I never once approached greatness, but toward the end of my career, I was always in the game. -- Pat Conroy
Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses? -- Pat Conroy
I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home. -- Pat Conroy
The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man. -- Pat Conroy
The most powerful words in English are, Tell me a story. -- Pat Conroy
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
I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist. -- Pat Conroy
Thought you didn't believe in God," I said to Savannah as we moved slowly past the Coast Guard base at the end of the Charleston peninsula. "I don't," Savannah answered, "but I believe in Luke and he believes in God and I always believe in God when I truly need him." "Situational faith," I said. -- Pat Conroy
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
I'm not the lovable, wonderful, tenderhearted grandfather that you read about in books. I'm grouchy and curmudgeonly, and I have a lot of rules. -- Pat Conroy
Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks. -- Pat Conroy
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
When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year. -- Pat Conroy
These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart. -- Pat Conroy
You the white teacher. I thought you one of the boys." Then she paused. "You gonna drink it?" "Yep." "Teachers drink?" "Yep." "That's good. Oh Gawd, that's so good. I got some gin in that there paper bag when you finish. -- Pat Conroy
I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid. -- Pat Conroy
Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers -- Pat Conroy
I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards. -- Pat Conroy
In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them. -- Pat Conroy
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
A story untold could be the one that kills you. -- Pat Conroy
If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me. -- Pat Conroy
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
Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe. -- Pat Conroy
Honor is the presence of God in man. -- Pat Conroy
There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal. -- Pat Conroy
In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers. -- Pat Conroy
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
I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate. -- Pat Conroy
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. -- Pat Conroy
My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children. -- Pat Conroy
I was becoming convinced that the world was a colorful, variegated grab bag full of bastards. But -- Pat Conroy
My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide. -- Pat Conroy
Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law. -- Pat Conroy
Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility. -- Pat Conroy
It all makes more sense when I'm out here alone," he smiled. "I can talk myself into anything. -- Pat Conroy
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
If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you. -- Pat Conroy
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
My poor boat poked along the waterway with the blinding speed of a manatee. -- Pat Conroy
South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult. -- Pat Conroy
I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
One must always forgive another's passion. -- Pat Conroy
You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves. -- Pat Conroy
I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day. -- Pat Conroy
We Shall Overcome by Pete Seeger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
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
I've never had anyone's approval, so I've learned to live without it. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible. -- Pat Conroy
You must appreciate beauty for it to endure. -- Pat Conroy
Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time. -- Pat Conroy
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
A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater. -- Pat Conroy
Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity. -- Pat Conroy
Surface my wife's most vicious -- Pat Conroy
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk. -- Pat Conroy
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
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss. -- Pat Conroy
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
Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name. -- Pat Conroy
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
Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real. -- Pat Conroy
I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake. -- Pat Conroy
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
In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake. -- Pat Conroy
Beautiful cities have a treacherous nature. -- Pat Conroy
He treated the stars as though they were love songs written to him by God. -- Pat Conroy
I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them. -- Pat Conroy
Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth. -- Pat Conroy
The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river. -- Pat Conroy
Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood. -- Pat Conroy
Time moves funny and it's hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it gives you only one chance. -- Pat Conroy
I had the need to be the good master, but definitely the master, no matter what the cost. -- Pat Conroy
Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges. -- Pat Conroy
I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and with a tongue fluent only in praise. -- Pat Conroy
We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, "Oh, Mama, do it again!" And I had my earliest memory. -- Pat Conroy
The human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them. -- Pat Conroy
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
College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts. -- Pat Conroy
It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts. -- Pat Conroy
Without music, life is a journey through a desert. -- Pat Conroy
I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves. -- Pat Conroy
I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole. -- Pat Conroy
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
The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself. -- Pat Conroy
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
Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. -- Pat Conroy
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
My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
... it was but one of the things that made friendship with me an ambivalent enterprise. -- Pat Conroy
The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina. -- Pat Conroy
Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do. -- Pat Conroy
I've had an amazing life, Pat. I wouldn't change a thing. Except this: they used to trust teachers with the kids they sent us. It's all different now and oh, so wrong." So -- Pat Conroy
Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood. -- Pat Conroy
I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature. -- Pat Conroy
Before I met the Jesuits, I'd never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics. -- Pat Conroy
Man wonders but God decides
When to kill the Prince of Tides. -- Pat Conroy
The forlorn appearance assumed by all houses that have lost their people. -- Pat Conroy
Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen. -- Pat Conroy
I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation. -- Pat Conroy
I envy the tireless intimacy of women's friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength. -- Pat Conroy
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
The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it. -- Pat Conroy
Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life. -- Pat Conroy
I don't believe in happy families. -- Pat Conroy
One does not know where love will take you. -- Pat Conroy
The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough. -- Pat Conroy
Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most. -- Pat Conroy
The porpoise has always been a sign of renewal and of the charged magical life. -- Pat Conroy
I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself. -- Pat Conroy
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
I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told. -- Pat Conroy
Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide. -- Pat Conroy
Sergeant Hicks seemed to be laid out in squares as though he were constructed out of cinder blocks. There was a hardness to his body that made his uniform appear to be little more than a paint job. He walked as if each step he took was driving a hated enemy toward a precipice. -- Pat Conroy
Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch. -- Pat Conroy
I selected all my books for the possibility of some flare of candles along the road toward illumination or enchantment -- Pat Conroy
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
A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up. -- Pat Conroy
When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children -- Pat Conroy
At the top the bridge with the stars shining above the harbor, I look to the north and wish again that there were two lives apportioned to every man and woman. -- Pat Conroy
On its own, my spirit seemed to relax, like a folding chair let out by a pool. -- Pat Conroy
(You) don't leave the chicken to watch the feed. -- Pat Conroy
has not evolved enough -- Pat Conroy
Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family. -- Pat Conroy
Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always. -- Pat Conroy
Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers. -- Pat Conroy
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
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
I knew about the terrorism of the human spirit and understood that ruthless, immoral forces had planted alien flags in my soul. The plebe system gave cruelty a good name, disguised sadism in the severe raiment of duty. -- Pat Conroy
I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me. -- Pat Conroy
My irritation with Niles was growing, though. I had always thought the quiet man was the most overrated form of human life. -- Pat Conroy
If Henry Wingo had not been a violent man, I think he would have made a splendid father. -- Pat Conroy
Each divorce is the death of a small civilization. -- Pat Conroy
Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks. -- Pat Conroy
The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do. -- Pat Conroy
Few things rivet me like the beauty of moving water. -- Pat Conroy
Of the Yamacraw children, I can say little. I don't think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their birth. -- Pat Conroy
There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe. -- Pat Conroy
A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out. -- Pat Conroy
Good taste is not something you can be taught. It's not something you obtain in a store or go to college to learn. -- Pat Conroy
Bernie could talk a Baptist into burning a Bible, -- Pat Conroy
Mansions were forming like jewels in my bloodstream. -- Pat Conroy
Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart. -- Pat Conroy
Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself. -- Pat Conroy
A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America. -- Pat Conroy
Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic. -- Pat Conroy
Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying. -- Pat Conroy
I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character. -- Pat Conroy
Families without songs are unhappy families. -- Pat Conroy
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
I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused. -- Pat Conroy
Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been. -- Pat Conroy
My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood. -- Pat Conroy
The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least. -- Pat Conroy
I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown. -- Pat Conroy
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
Lightning flashed around the island; thunder played its favorite game of scaring the crap out of all the shivering mortals on the earth below. -- Pat Conroy
Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry. -- Pat Conroy
The past was one country where I tried to limit the number of free trips. -- Pat Conroy
I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position. -- Pat Conroy
She had awakened something in him that had slumbered far too long. Not only did he feel passion, he felt the return of hope. -- Pat Conroy
Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling. -- Pat Conroy
Pervasive part of the island culture -- Pat Conroy
Losing tears along the seam of your own image of yourself. It is a mark of shame that causes internal injury, but no visible damage. -- Pat Conroy
I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee. -- Pat Conroy
Voyagers can remove the masks and those sinuous, intricate disguises we wear at home in the dangerous equilibrium of our common lives. -- Pat Conroy
One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family. -- Pat Conroy
Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood. -- Pat Conroy
He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives. -- Pat Conroy
I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth. -- Pat Conroy
Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all. -- Pat Conroy
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
Take the local, take the express, don't get off till you reach success
Sidney Rosen (Prince Of Tides) -- Pat Conroy
As a teacher, I had been a happy man. Now, I was only a diminished one. -- Pat Conroy
The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life. -- Pat Conroy
I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure. -- Pat Conroy
Writing has never been that simple for me. -- Pat Conroy
The music acted as a marinade in my weary spirit. -- Pat Conroy
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
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey. -- Pat Conroy
Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word. -- Pat Conroy
Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing. -- Pat Conroy
[P]enmanship as pretty as a row of tulips -- Pat Conroy
There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue. -- Pat Conroy
Upstaged by a schizophrenic, Dallas said. The story of my life. -- Pat Conroy
One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher. -- Pat Conroy
My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. -- Pat Conroy
The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience. -- Pat Conroy
Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all. -- Pat Conroy
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
I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood. -- Pat Conroy
The choices I didn't make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did. -- Pat Conroy
The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement. -- Pat Conroy
[M]otherlessness caused one of the great thirsts of the human condition. -- Pat Conroy
It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it. -- Pat Conroy
She saw the world through a dazzling prism of authentic imagination. -- Pat Conroy
There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people. -- Pat Conroy
He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart. -- Pat Conroy
I was born in the age of "alas". -- Pat Conroy
Mrs. Brown, whose primary job on the island -- Pat Conroy
I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small. -- Pat Conroy
I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father. -- Pat Conroy
She was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets. -- Pat Conroy
I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever. -- Pat Conroy
My mother raised me to be a writer. -- Pat Conroy
She wore defeat like a piece of cheap jewelry. "Worshiping them. Anointing them with oil, Mrs. Gervais," I said. -- Pat Conroy
The party was very painful to me, as parties usually were, and I felt the familiar loneliness of crowds. -- Pat Conroy
All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless. -- Pat Conroy
