Top 300 Pat Conroy Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 7

51. “He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.”

— Pat Conroy

52. “Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.”

— Pat Conroy

53. “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

54. “Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.”

— Pat Conroy

55. “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

56. “Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”

— Pat Conroy

57. “I envy the tireless intimacy of women’s friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.”

— Pat Conroy

58. “The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.”

— Pat Conroy

59. “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

60. “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

61. “The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.”

— Pat Conroy

62. “I don’t know when my parents began their war against each other – but I do know the only prisoners they took were their children.”

— Pat Conroy

63. “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

64. “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

65. “I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting.”

— Pat Conroy

66. “Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.”

— Pat Conroy

67. “There is no city on Earth quite like Charleston. From the time I first came there in 1961, it’s held me in its enchanter’s power, the wordless articulation of its singularity, its withheld and magical beauty. Wandering through its streets can be dreamlike and otherworldly, its alleyways and shortcuts both fragrant and mysterious, yet as haunted as time turned in on itself.”

— Pat Conroy

68. “Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.”

— Pat Conroy

69. “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

70. “Yet I can walk away from best friends and rarely think of them again. I can close a door and not look back. There’s something about my soul that’s always ready to go, to break camp, to unfold the road map, to leave at night when the house inspection’s done and the civilians are asleep and the open road is calling...”

— Pat Conroy

71. “Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.”

— Pat Conroy

72. “I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.”

— Pat Conroy

73. “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

74. “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

75. “Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.”

— Pat Conroy

76. “Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.”

— Pat Conroy

77. “The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.”

— Pat Conroy

78. “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

79. “Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.”

— Pat Conroy

80. “Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.”

— Pat Conroy

81. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.”

— Pat Conroy

82. “My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.”

— Pat Conroy

83. “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

84. “The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave.”

— Pat Conroy

85. “Humanity is best described as inhumanity.”

— Pat Conroy

86. “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

87. “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

88. “I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.”

— Pat Conroy

89. “Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.”

— Pat Conroy

90. “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

91. “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

92. “Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.”

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

94. “My own tears seemed landlocked and frozen in a glacier I could not reach or touch within me.”

— Pat Conroy

95. “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

96. “Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.”

— Pat Conroy

97. “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

98. “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

99. “I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.”

— Pat Conroy

100. “Well, at least she doesn’t have to be a housewife the rest of her life,” she said. “What in the hell do you have against housewives?” I said. “I was raised by one,” Savannah said. “And it almost ruined my life.” “I got knocked around by a shrimper when I was a kid,” said Luke, “but I never blamed the shrimp.”

— Pat Conroy