Top 300 Pat Conroy Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.”

— Pat Conroy

205. “Don’t go yet. Please. Tell me a story, one about us. Tell what it meant. How on earth did it happen? The story, Pat – tell it to me.”

— Pat Conroy

206. “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.”

— Pat Conroy

207. “My poor boat poked along the waterway with the blinding speed of a manatee.”

— Pat Conroy

208. “Like many men and women who make egregious and irretrievable mistakes with their own children, she would redeem herself by becoming the perfect grandmother.”

— Pat Conroy

209. “He lived out his whole life as an anthem to the pleasures of a bad mood.”

— Pat Conroy

210. “Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts – the ability and willingness to change his mind and do it in an orderly, well-reasoned way.”

— Pat Conroy

211. “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

212. “We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve got to be patient enough to wait for them.”

— Pat Conroy

213. “On the road, he was alive, vibrant, moving. It didn’t afford the freedom of a jet plane flying through a clear sky, but a highway offered something almost as profound, an entry into the secret regions of the earth where towns with foreign, unrecallable names were violated once, then forgotten for all time.”

— Pat Conroy

214. “I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.”

— Pat Conroy

215. “Parisians and polar icecaps have a lot in common except that polar icecaps are warmer to strangers.”

— Pat Conroy

216. “Writing has never been that simple for me.”

— Pat Conroy

217. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

219. “People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.”

— Pat Conroy

220. “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

221. “One does not know where love will take you.”

— Pat Conroy

222. “Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.”

— Pat Conroy

223. “A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out.”

— Pat Conroy

224. “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

225. “I’m an American male, Lowenstein,” I said, smiling. “It’s not my job to be open.” “What exactly is the American male’s job?” she asked. “To be maddening. To be unreadable, controlling, bull-headed, and insensitive,” I said.”

— Pat Conroy

226. “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

227. “Families without songs are unhappy families.”

— Pat Conroy

228. “This room had long served as a retreat from the disharmony and sadness of the first floor, and it was here I had fallen in love with these books and authors in a way that only lifelong readers know and understand. 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 good movie could change my perceptions for a day.”

— Pat Conroy

229. “Political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry.”

— Pat Conroy

230. “He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.”

— Pat Conroy

231. “Those wishing to be successful in the market can’t ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have.”

— Pat Conroy

232. “The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.”

— Pat Conroy

233. “The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.”

— Pat Conroy

234. “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 for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I’m supposed to write – the grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don’t quite know it. But I trust I’ll begin to know it soon.”

— Pat Conroy

235. “The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.”

— Pat Conroy

236. “Even then, her interior life was far more important to her than her external one.”

— Pat Conroy

237. “When you write by hand, you don’t have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, “Is this necessary at this point in the book?”

— Pat Conroy

238. “Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science.”

— Pat Conroy

239. “But sometimes stories hide themselves from writers like trolls under bridges. Then the writers of the world must keep their bodies attuned for the sudden appearance of the story that is powerful enough to change their novels and their lives. They must train themselves to recognize the divine moment when a great story reveals itself.”

— Pat Conroy

240. “Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.”

— Pat Conroy

241. “I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.”

— Pat Conroy

242. “You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.”

— Pat Conroy

243. “I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.”

— Pat Conroy

244. “To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.”

— Pat Conroy

245. “What kind of world is it, Ben thought, that lets its coaches die without his boys around him, buying him Cokes, calling him by his first name, and rubbing his shoulder with Atomic Balm? He died without a face in a room I never saw without my kisses in the stained gauze or without my prayers entering the center of his pain. But worst of all, O God, you let him die, let Coach Murphy die, let Dave die, without my thanks, my thanks, my thanks.”

— Pat Conroy

246. “Mansions were forming like jewels in my bloodstream.”

— Pat Conroy

247. “I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day.”

— Pat Conroy

248. “There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. I am more fabulist than historian, but I will try to give you the insoluble, unedited terror of youth. I betray the integrity of my family’s history by turning everything, even sadness, into romance. There is no romance in this story; there is only the story.”

— Pat Conroy

249. “I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.”

— Pat Conroy

250. “And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times.”

— Pat Conroy