Pat Conroy Quotes & Sayings

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

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world. — 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

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

I loved my parents ... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood. — Pat Conroy

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word. — Pat Conroy

I learned that politicians are not supposed to help people. They simply listen to people, nod their heads painfully, commiserate at proper intervals, promise to do all they can, and then do nothing. It was very instructive. I could probably have enlisted more action from a bleached jellyfish washed ashore in a seasonal storm. — Pat Conroy

But, as I watch this film, I often think that the boy did not know what he was really running toward, that it was not the end zone which awaited him. Somewhere in that ten second dash the running boy turned to metaphor and the older man could see it where the boy couldn not. He would be good at running, always good at it, and he would always run away from the things that hurt him, from the people who loved him, and from the friends empowered to save him. But where do we run when there are no crowds, no lights, no end zones? Where does a man run? the coach said, studying the films of himself as a boy. Where can a man run when he has lost the excuse of games? Where can a man run or where can he hide when he looks behind him and sees that he is only pursued by himself? — Pat Conroy

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next. — Pat Conroy

I envy the tireless intimacy of women's friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength. — Pat Conroy

In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some of the things your parents did to you. But with friends it's different. Friends aren't the roll of the dice. — 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

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

Lucy stood on her tiptoes and kissed John Hardin on the cheek and pulled him tightly against her. She put his forehead against hers and smiled at him until he blushed. Then, Lucy stepped back, looked at the coffin, and played to the crowd. Who gave my secret away It's just what I always wanted and I can't wait to try it on — 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

Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry. — Pat Conroy

William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book, The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It's a crowning achievement of his own storied career. — 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

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

I have come to revere words like "democracy" and "freedom," the right to vote, the incomprehensibly beautiful origins of my country, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I not see America's flaws? Of course I do. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam ... I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones, but lacked the courage to act on: America is a good enough country to die for even when she is wrong. — Pat Conroy

The choices I didn't make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did. — Pat Conroy

The music acted as a marinade in my weary spirit. — 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

Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true. — Pat Conroy

The past was one country where I tried to limit the number of free trips. — 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

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

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

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it. — Pat Conroy

I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown. — Pat Conroy

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure. — 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've always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people's books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer's imagination. — 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

Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying. — Pat Conroy

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration. — 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

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization. — Pat Conroy

I blaze with a deep sullen magic, smell lust like a heron on fire; all words I form into castles then storm them with soldiers of air. What I seek is not there for asking. My armies are fit and well trained. This poet will trust her battalions to fashion her words into blades. At dawn I shall ask them for beauty, for proof that their training went well. At night I shall beg their forgiveness as I cut their throats by the hill. My navies advance through the language, destroyers ablaze in high seas. I soften the island for landings. With words, I enlist a dark army. My poems are my war with the world. I blaze with a deep southern magic. The bombardiers taxi at noon. There is screaming and grief in the mansions and the moon is a heron on fire. — Pat Conroy

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism. — 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

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary — Pat Conroy

He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart. — 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

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

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

I don't believe in happy families. — Pat Conroy

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide. — Pat Conroy

Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks. — 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

Voyagers can remove the masks and those sinuous, intricate disguises we wear at home in the dangerous equilibrium of our common lives. — Pat Conroy

It's the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much. — 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

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

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

It had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress . — 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

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

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

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

The porpoise has always been a sign of renewal and of the charged magical life. — 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

I want to be lovely in death... — 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

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

It's the southern way, Doctor." "The southern way?" she said. "My mother's immortal phrase. We laugh when the pain gets too much. We laugh when the pity of human life gets too ... pitiful. We laugh when there's nothing else to do." "When do you weep ... according to the southern way?" "After we laugh, Doctor. Always. Always after we laugh. — Pat Conroy

Few people understood the exceptional role the civil rights movement had on the white boys and girls of the South. Bill Clinton would never have become who he was without the shining example of Martin Luther King. The same is true of Jimmy Carter and Fritz Hollings and Richard and Joe Riley. Imagine this: you're a little white kid and you watch firehoses turned on people who don't seem to be hurting anyone, and fierce dogs being tuned on young men who carry signs about freedom. We white kids grew up watching movies and TV and guess what we had learned to do? We had learned to tell the good guys from the bad guys. — Pat Conroy

Surface my wife's most vicious — 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

My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide. — Pat Conroy

Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination. — Pat Conroy

Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. — 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

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

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

If any writer in this country has collected as fine and passionate a group of readers as I have, they're fortunate and lucky beyond anyone's imagination. It remains a shock to me that I've had a successful writing career. Not someone like me; Lord, there were too many forces working against me, too many dark currents pushing against me, but it somehow worked. Though I wish I'd written a lot more, been bolder with my talent, more forgiving of my weaknesses, I've managed to draw a magic audience into my circle. They come to my signings to tell me stories, their stories. The ones that have hurt them and made their nights long and their lives harder. — 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

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

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law. — 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

Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes. — 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

I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee. — 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

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

Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic. — Pat Conroy

Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy. — 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

I selected all my books for the possibility of some flare of candles along the road toward illumination or enchantment — 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

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

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

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention. — Pat Conroy

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers — Pat Conroy

I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate. — 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

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

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

Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility. — 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