Top 300 Pat Conroy Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 7

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

217. “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

218. “Families without songs are unhappy families.”

— Pat Conroy

219. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

224. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

231. “The scampi tasted sweet like a lobster fed only on honey and it cut into the deep undertone of flavor deposited on the taste buds by the truffles.”

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

236. “I’ve spent most of my life avoiding the companionship of writers. I try never to be rude, just seldom available. Though I have met some of the great writers of our time, I’ve become good friends with very few of them. The tribe is contentious, the breed dangerous.”

— Pat Conroy

237. “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

238. “Home is a damaged word, bruisable as fruit, in the cruel glossaries of the language I choose to describe the long, fearful march of my childhood. Home was a word that caught in my throat, stung like a paper cut, drew blood in its passover of my life, and hurt me in all the soft places. My longing for home was as powerful as fire in my bloodstream.”

— Pat Conroy

239. “I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class.”

— Pat Conroy

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

247. “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

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

— Pat Conroy

249. “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

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