Pat Conroy Quotes

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.
Pat Conroy
A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.
Pat Conroy
Without music life is a journey through a desert.
Pat Conroy
As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers.
Pat Conroy
The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man.
Pat Conroy
Before I met the Jesuits, I’d never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.
Pat Conroy
Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, "the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.
Pat Conroy
Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.
Pat Conroy
If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.
Pat Conroy
I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.
Pat Conroy
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
In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game.
Pat Conroy
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
...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand...
Pat Conroy
It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.
Pat Conroy
Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.
Pat Conroy
The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
Pat Conroy
I was born in the age of "alas".
Pat Conroy
Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.
Pat Conroy
I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
Pat Conroy
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
Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
Pat Conroy
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
Honor is the presence of God in man.
Pat Conroy
it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress .
Pat Conroy
I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.
Pat Conroy
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
The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.
Pat Conroy
We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.
Pat Conroy
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
I was a watchful boy being raised by a father I didn’t admire. In a desperate way, I needed the guidance of someone who could show me another way of becoming a man. It was sometime during the year when I decided I would become the kind of man that Bill Dufford was born to be. I wanted to be the type of man that a whole town could respect and honor and fall in love with—the way Beaufort did when Bill Dufford came to town to teach and shape and turn its children into the best citizens they could be.
Pat Conroy
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
I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.
Pat Conroy
Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
Pat Conroy
One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
Pat Conroy
Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
Pat Conroy
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
Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.
Pat Conroy
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
Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers
Pat Conroy
I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.
Pat Conroy
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
An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.
Pat Conroy
There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help.
Pat Conroy
The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell's ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals. If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms.
Pat Conroy
Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.
Pat Conroy
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation
Pat Conroy
Wasn't Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year?" "Yes, but the airport's perfectly safe.
Pat Conroy
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
A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America.
Pat Conroy
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
From the beginning, I’ve told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I’m the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.
Pat Conroy
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
i was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities.
Pat Conroy
What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts
Pat Conroy
Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
Pat Conroy
You're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world.
Pat Conroy
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
Pat Conroy
I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.
Pat Conroy
I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
Pat Conroy