Top 300 Pat Conroy Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “I reveled in class discussion and the Socratic method of drawing substance out of calcified minds untrained to think.”

— Pat Conroy

155. “Always believe in things and people that bring you pleasure. What good does it do to throw those things out the window?”

— Pat Conroy

156. “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

157. “The reading of great books has been a life altering activity to me and, for better or worse, it 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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “One must always forgive another’s passion.”

— Pat Conroy

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.”

— Pat Conroy

166. “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

167. “The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.”

— Pat Conroy

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing.”

— Pat Conroy

172. “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

173. “There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.”

— Pat Conroy

174. “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

175. “I’ve always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.”

— Pat Conroy

176. “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

177. “I’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means – some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.”

— Pat Conroy

178. “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

179. “I was becoming convinced that the world was a colorful, variegated grab bag full of bastards. But.”

— Pat Conroy

180. “Without my knowledge, the mooncalf bedlam of Ireland had filled me with an incurable anxiety, an uncontrollable temper, a tendency to abuse alcohol, a stubbornness I found both repellent and incurable, and a tendency to always think I’m right. What a screwed up legacy this hard-hearted Ireland left to me.”

— Pat Conroy

181. “Alertness is a requirement of the writing life, staying nimble on your feet, open to the stories that will rise up and flower around you while you are walking your dog on the beach or taking the kids to soccer practice. The great stories often make their approach with misdirection, camouflage, or smoke screens to hide their passage through your life.”

— Pat Conroy

182. “Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”

— Pat Conroy

183. “Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers.”

— Pat Conroy

184. “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

185. “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

186. “I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.”

— Pat Conroy

187. “I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.”

— Pat Conroy

188. “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

189. “I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.”

— Pat Conroy

190. “Upstaged by a schizophrenic, Dallas said. The story of my life.”

— Pat Conroy

191. “Fantasy is one of the soul’s brighter porcelains.”

— Pat Conroy

192. “Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.”

— Pat Conroy

193. “I never once approached greatness, but toward the end of my career, I was always in the game.”

— Pat Conroy

194. “College was to teach me that I was one of life’s journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.”

— Pat Conroy

195. “My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel – the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.”

— Pat Conroy

196. “But I had married a fine and comely girl, and with brilliance and craft and all instincts of self-preservation jettisoned, I succeeded over the years, through neglect, coldness, and betrayal, in turning her into the exact image of my mother.”

— Pat Conroy

197. “The choices I didn’t make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.”

— Pat Conroy

198. “A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America.”

— Pat Conroy

199. “Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers.”

— Pat Conroy

200. “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