Conroy Quotes & Sayings

I've always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal. — 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

This room had long served as a retreat from the disharmony and sadness of the first floor, and it was here I had fallen in love with these books and authors in a way that only lifelong readers know and understand. A good movie had never once affected me in the same life-changing way a good book could. Books had the power to alter my view of the world forever. A good movie could change my perceptions for a day. — 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

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

. . . the hardships and perils that eat around the edges of even the strongest loves. — 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

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

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

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

Pervasive part of the island culture — 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

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

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 guess I am basically most comfortable when I'm alone. As a kid, I was very much a loner. I love long distance running and long distance biking. A director once pointed out that those are all very isolated exercises you do for hours at a time. — Kevin 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

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

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

The depressed and the suicidal are often lonely and inhibited. Discussions of inhibition in this context usually emphasize fear of rejection. — David L. 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

Some people ask me, Do they put aging makeup on you? It's just this very nice street makeup. — Frances 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

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

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 own tears seemed landlocked and frozen in a glacier I could not reach or touch within me. — Pat Conroy

Without music, life is a journey through a desert. — 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

Few things rivet me like the beauty of moving water. — Pat Conroy

I was a watchful boy being raised by a father I didn't admire. In a desperate way, I needed the guidance of someone who could show me another way of becoming a man. It was sometime during the year when I decided I would become the kind of man that Bill Dufford was born to be. I wanted to be the type of man that a whole town could respect and honor and fall in love with - the way Beaufort did when Bill Dufford came to town to teach and shape and turn its children into the best citizens they could be. — Pat Conroy

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else. — Pat Conroy

Everyone has a private self and a public self. — Kevin Conroy

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

I did not want the evening to end just yet. I needed time to memorize what happiness felt like because I had experienced so little of it. Looking up into the night sky, I saw the Milky Way. I instantly thought of God and how I was afraid I was losing my faith in Him and the immensity of the fear and cowardice I felt when I thought of facing the world without Him. I was receiving the Eucharist every day of my life and fighting this war with faithlessness with every cell of my body, but I could feel the withdrawal taking place without my consent. — Pat Conroy

Art is one of the few places where talent and madness can actually go to squirrel away inside each other. — Pat Conroy

... it was but one of the things that made friendship with me an ambivalent enterprise. — Pat Conroy

It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils.
Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold ... The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks. — Pat Conroy

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

Surface my wife's most vicious — Pat Conroy

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air. — Pat Conroy

From the beginning, I've told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I'm the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel. — Pat Conroy

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people. — 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

There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He had not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town's consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit's harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. "That's the Southern way" my grandmother said. "That's the nice way. — Pat Conroy

To be subjected to pain that threatens to exceed coping resources is not something that people choose. — David L. 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

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

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

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

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

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

I was becoming convinced that the world was a colorful, variegated grab bag full of bastards. But — Pat Conroy

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina. — Pat Conroy

The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement. — 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

I was raised in the Marine Corps and I was taught as a boy that you feed your own men before you feed yourself. It was my belief then, and it remains so today, that my platoon who loves and respect me will slaughter your platoon that hates you. But here is the great lesson I took from the plebe system - it let me know exactly the kind of man I wanted to become. It made me ache to be a contributing citizen in whatever society I found myself in, to live out a life I could be proud of, and always to measure up to what I took to be the highest ideal of a Citadel man - or, now, a Citadel woman. The standards were clear to me and they were high, and I took my marching orders from my college to take my hard-won education and go out to try to make the whole world a better place. — Pat Conroy

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me. — Pat Conroy

I never once approached greatness, but toward the end of my career, I was always in the game. — Pat Conroy

I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers. — Pat Conroy

I do not think I was a hothead - not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life. — 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

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

I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards. — 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

I think that different actors bring different qualities to the Batman character. It's such a wonderful mantle to put on that I think it's a lot of fun for different actors to see how they play it. — Kevin Conroy

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

I was born in the age of "alas". — Pat Conroy

Though I've never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones, those who must teach in public schools when the whole nation seems at war with the very essence of teaching. — 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

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

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough. — 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

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

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

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. — Pat Conroy

Bruce Wayne is Batman. He became Batman the instant his parents were murdered. Batman needs Bruce, however hollow that identity feels to him from time to time. Bruce keeps Batman human. — Kevin 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

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss. — Pat Conroy

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart. — 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

I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused. — Pat Conroy

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless. — 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

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

Help them, but don't make friends with them. — 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

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