Top 300 Pat Conroy Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.”

— Pat Conroy

252. “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

253. “Son, you can do more good at Yamacraw than you could ever do in the Peace Corps. And you would be helping Americans, Pat. And I, for one, think it’s very important to help Americans.”

— Pat Conroy

254. “I have built a city from the books I’ve read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.”

— Pat Conroy

255. “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

256. “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

257. “Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.”

— Pat Conroy

258. “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

259. “Lucy stood on her tiptoes and kissed John Hardin on the cheek and pulled him tightly against her. She put his forehead against hers and smiled at him until he blushed. Then, Lucy stepped back, looked at the coffin, and played to the crowd. Who gave my secret away It’s just what I always wanted and I can’t wait to try it on.”

— Pat Conroy

260. “My father wouldn’t let me take typing in childhood.”

— Pat Conroy

261. “Because I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.”

— Pat Conroy

262. “She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs.”

— Pat Conroy

263. “No city could be more beautiful than Charleston during the brief reign of azaleas, no city on earth.”

— Pat Conroy

264. “I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.”

— Pat Conroy

265. “Among the peoples of the world I am not universally admired for the bell-like clarity of my diction. Words slide out of my mouth like fat fish. Having lived my life in various parts of Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas and having been sired by a gruff-talking Marine from Chicago and a grits-and-gravy honey from Rome, Georgia, what has remained is an indefinable nonspeech, flavored subtly with a nonaccent, and decipherable to no one, black or white, on the American continent.”

— Pat Conroy

266. “You the white teacher. I thought you one of the boys.” Then she paused. “You gonna drink it?” “Yep.” “Teachers drink?” “Yep.” “That’s good. Oh Gawd, that’s so good. I got some gin in that there paper bag when you finish.”

— Pat Conroy

267. “Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.”

— Pat Conroy

268. “A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she’s tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.”

— Pat Conroy

269. “I’ve never cackled with laughter at a single line I’ve ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.”

— Pat Conroy

270. “The past was one country where I tried to limit the number of free trips.”

— Pat Conroy

271. “By carefully editing what I thought would harm her, I turned my childhood into something as glamorous as forbidden fruit.”

— Pat Conroy

272. “Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.”

— Pat Conroy

273. “My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.”

— Pat Conroy

274. “We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.”

— Pat Conroy

275. “There is no stronger brotherhood than between two boys who discover that both were born to fathers who waged war on their sons.”

— Pat Conroy

276. “When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other.”

— Pat Conroy

277. “Reading Tolstoy makes us strive to be better people: better husbands and wives, children, and friends. He tries to teach us how to live by letting us participate in the brimming, storied experiences of his fictional world. Reading Leo Tolstoy, you will encounter a novelist who fell in love with his world and everything he saw and felt in it.”

— Pat Conroy

278. “One noteworthy thing about South Carolina is the quality of school-bus drivers in the state. To qualify for a bus license one must have reached puberty and be able to recite the alphabet without stuttering.”

— Pat Conroy

279. “The city of Charleston, in the green feathery modesty of its palms, in the certitude of its style, in the economy and stringency of its lines, and the serenity of its mansions South of Broad Street, is a feast for the human eye.”

— Pat Conroy

280. “Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary.”

— Pat Conroy

281. “Stories have always hunted me down, jumped out at me from the shadows, stalked me and sought me out, grabbed me by the shirtsleeves, and demanded my full attention. I’ve led a life chock-full of stories, and I know now that you have to be shifty and vigilant and ready to receive their incoming fire. Sometimes it takes the passage of years to reveal their actual meaning or import. They disguise themselves with masks, disfigurements, chimeras, and Trojan horses.”

— Pat Conroy

282. “And each year, I lose a little bit more of what made me special as a kid. I don’t think as much or question as much. I dare nothing. I put nothing on the line. Even my passions are now frayed and pathetic.”

— Pat Conroy

283. “We’ve made it back to each other. We’ve got lots of time to try our hands at restoring the ruins.”

— Pat Conroy

284. “What I wanted most was a life of vigorous quality.”

— Pat Conroy

285. “You blame your parents for so much, Tom. When does it start becoming your own responsibility? When do you take your life into your own hands? When do you start accepting the blame or credit for your own actions?”

— Pat Conroy

286. “My approach to Charleston is always silent and distracted, but I come under full sail, with hissing silk and memories a wing above me in the shapes of the birds I love best.”

— Pat Conroy

287. “As I applauded, I knew that it would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.”

— Pat Conroy

288. “Both of them became adept at killing off the best qualities of the other. In some ways, there was something classic and quintessentially American in their marriage. They began as lovers and ended up as the most dangerous and unutterable of enemies. As lovers, they begat children; as enemies, they created damaged, endangered children.”

— Pat Conroy

289. “I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well.”

— Pat Conroy

290. “Early on, I had contracted that dread affliction of oldest or only children – I lived for the absolute approval of my parents.”

— Pat Conroy

291. “She took my hand and squeezed it. “You sold yourself short. You could’ve been more than a teacher and a coach.” I returned the squeeze and said, “Listen to me, Savannah. There’s no word in the language I revere more than teacher. None. My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming one.”

— Pat Conroy

292. “I studied their relationship with something approaching awe because I could not figure out what made it work. I felt love between these two people but it was a love without flame or passion. There were also no rancors or fevers, no risings or ebbings of the spirit to chart, just a marriage without weather, a stillness, a resignation, just windless days in the Gulf Stream of their quiet aging.”

— Pat Conroy

293. “I find myself happiest in the middle of a book in which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.”

— Pat Conroy

294. “I wish I had no history to report. I’ve pretended for so long that my childhood did not happen. I had to keep it tight, up near the chest. I could not let it out.”

— Pat Conroy

295. “My life did not really begin until I summoned the power to forgive my father for making my childhood a long march of terror.”

— Pat Conroy

296. “There is something glacial, fishlike, and prodigiously remote about Parisians. At the sound of an approaching foreigner, their faces are as bland and expressionless as salamanders.”

— Pat Conroy

297. “Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves.”

— Pat Conroy

298. “In the hour it took to finish that meal, I learned that silence could be the most eloquent form of lying.”

— Pat Conroy

299. “I still believe that they both loved us deeply, but, as with many parents, their love proved to be the most lethal thing about them.”

— Pat Conroy

300. “They love their families with their hearts and souls and they wage war against them to prove it.”

— Pat Conroy