Pat Conroy Quotes - Page 2

One must always forgive another's passion.
Pat Conroy
Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the safe protectorate of his soft, uncritical maleness, I never wholly appreciated him. I did not know how to cherish sanctity, and I had no way of honoring, of giving small voice to the praise of such natural innocence, such a generous simplicity. Now I know that a part of me would like to have traveled the world as he traveled it, a jester of burning faith, a fool and a forest prince brimming with the love of God. I would like to walk his southern world, thanking God for oysters and porpoises, praising God for birdsongs and sheet lightning, and seeing God reflected in pools of creekwater and the eyes of stray cats. I would like to have talked to yard dogs and tanagers as if they were my friends and fellow travelers along the sun-tortured highways, intoxicated with a love of God, swollen with charity like a rainbow, in the thoughtless mingling of its hues, connecting two distant fields in its glorious arc. I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and a tongue fluent only in praise.
Pat Conroy
You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.
Pat Conroy
If any writer in this country has collected as fine and passionate a group of readers as I have, they’re fortunate and lucky beyond anyone’s imagination. It remains a shock to me that I’ve had a successful writing career. Not someone like me; Lord, there were too many forces working against me, too many dark currents pushing against me, but it somehow worked. Though I wish I’d written a lot more, been bolder with my talent, more forgiving of my weaknesses, I’ve managed to draw a magic audience into my circle. They come to my signings to tell me stories, their stories. The ones that have hurt them and made their nights long and their lives harder.
Pat Conroy
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
The teachers of my life saved my life and sent me out prepared for whatever life I was meant to lead. Like everyone else, I had some bad ones and mediocre ones, but I never had one that I thought was holding me back because of idleness or thoughtlessness. They spent their lives with the likes of me and I felt safe during the time they spent with me. The best of them made me want to be just like them. I wanted young kids to look at me the way I looked at the teachers who loved me. Loving them was not difficult for a boy like me. They lit a path for me, and one that I followed with joy.
Pat Conroy
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
I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
Pat Conroy
College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.
Pat Conroy
She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.
Pat Conroy
The choices I didn’t make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.
Pat Conroy
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
Pat Conroy
I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.
Pat Conroy
As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.
Pat Conroy
In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.
Pat Conroy
The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
Pat Conroy
The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
Pat Conroy
Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
Pat Conroy
It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.
Pat Conroy
Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure.
Pat Conroy
The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.
Pat Conroy
I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.
Pat Conroy
Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood.
Pat Conroy
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
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
Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers.
Pat Conroy
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
Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.
Pat Conroy
I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing faith and a belief in astonishment. And if by accident, I could make a volcano in a single test tube, then what could I do with all the strange magnificent elements of the world with its infinity of unknowns, with the swarm of man, with civilization, with language?
Pat Conroy
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
Pat Conroy
There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He had not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town’s consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit’s harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. “That’s the Southern way” my grandmother said. “That’s the nice way.
Pat Conroy
Help them, but don't make friends with them.
Pat Conroy
Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.
Pat Conroy
I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don't adhere.
Pat Conroy
My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.
Pat Conroy
He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.
Pat Conroy
The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story.
Pat Conroy
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
Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true.
Pat Conroy
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
Pat Conroy
Read the great books, gentlemen,” Mr. Monte said one day. “Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.
Pat Conroy
I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
Pat Conroy
I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.
Pat Conroy
Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.
Pat Conroy
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
You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It's a vicious cycle.
Pat Conroy
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
Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.
Pat Conroy
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
When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
Pat Conroy
Great romantics are granted lots of slack.
Pat Conroy
He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.
Pat Conroy
The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.
Pat Conroy
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
It’s the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.
Pat Conroy
In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some of the things your parents did to you. But with friends it's different. Friends aren't the roll of the dice.
Pat Conroy
Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.
Pat Conroy
These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.
Pat Conroy
Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.
Pat Conroy
Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
Pat Conroy