Top 300 Pat Conroy Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name.”

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

167. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

169. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

175. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

184. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

186. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

196. “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

197. “Throughout my career I’ve lived in constant fear that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I’d have nothing to say, that I’d be laughed at, humiliated – and I’m old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I’ll ever write. As.”

— Pat Conroy

198. “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

199. “I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization.”

— Pat Conroy

200. “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