Top 300 Pat Conroy Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.”

— Pat Conroy

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

164. “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

165. “I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.”

— Pat Conroy

166. “If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you.”

— Pat Conroy

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

171. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

173. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

179. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

189. “Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.”

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

191. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

197. “Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.”

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

199. “I knew about the terrorism of the human spirit and understood that ruthless, immoral forces had planted alien flags in my soul. The plebe system gave cruelty a good name, disguised sadism in the severe raiment of duty.”

— Pat Conroy

200. “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