Top 300 Pat Conroy Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.”

— Pat Conroy

103. “Think instead about children. People. Human beings. Feel for once that education is about people – not figures.”

— Pat Conroy

104. “From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.”

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

106. “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

107. “If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.”

— Pat Conroy

108. “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. I don’t think men can ever forgive women for loving them to the exclusion of all others.”

— Pat Conroy

109. “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

110. “There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.”

— Pat Conroy

111. “If Henry Wingo had not been a violent man, I think he would have made a splendid father.”

— Pat Conroy

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “Isn’t it a shame military doctors couldn’t be as good as military sunglasses?”

— Pat Conroy

117. “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

118. “I realized early that unless you’re willing to kill the innocent, you can’t win.”

— Pat Conroy

119. “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 great movie could change my perceptions for a day.”

— Pat Conroy

120. “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

121. “Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.”

— Pat Conroy

122. “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

123. “But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.”

— Pat Conroy

124. “Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life.”

— Pat Conroy

125. “My mother raised me to be a writer.”

— Pat Conroy

126. “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 have to like that trend or go along with it.”

— Pat Conroy

127. “You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.”

— Pat Conroy

128. “She had camouflaged the vinegar factory in her character with a great honeycomb along the sills and porches of her public self.”

— Pat Conroy

129. “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

130. “Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.”

— Pat Conroy

131. “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

132. “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

133. “I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.”

— Pat Conroy

134. “When you have been hurt you lose your trust in the world. If the world’s mean to you when you’re a child, you spend the rest of your life being mean back.”

— Pat Conroy

135. “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

136. “Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination.”

— Pat Conroy

137. “Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration, like an albino. LIke the albino it has no protective coloration. White. That is the color. Those placid, untroubled winter months are different shades of white in my memory, unsullied, and pure. But nature in the temperate zones is bitter towards all things white.”

— Pat Conroy

138. “Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.”

— Pat Conroy

139. “You’re going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It’s the hardest role in the world.”

— Pat Conroy

140. “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

141. “Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.”

— Pat Conroy

142. “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

143. “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

144. “When the poet closed her eyes the wingspan of the great horned owl cast a tawny shadow over the green immense forests. The owl returned to the forsaken nests of migrating buntings, entered the perfect circle in the heart of cypress, and found the misplaced opal, the color of buttermilk tinted with the inks of crushed violets. The.”

— Pat Conroy

145. “Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name.”

— Pat Conroy

146. “On its own, my spirit seemed to relax, like a folding chair let out by a pool.”

— Pat Conroy

147. “A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts...”

— Pat Conroy

148. “Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.”

— Pat Conroy

149. “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

150. “My pre-Yamacraw theory of teaching held several sacred tenets, among these being that the teacher must always maintain an air of insanity, or of eccentricity out of control, if he is to catch and hold the attention of his students. The teacher must always be on the attack, looking for new ideas, changing worn-out tactics, and never, ever falling into patterns that lead to student ennui.”

— Pat Conroy