Pat Conroy Quotes

[P]enmanship as pretty as a row of tulips ~ Pat Conroy

A porpoise sounded twenty yards away from us in an explosion of breath, startling us. . . . Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and a fourth porpoise neared the board and we could feel great secret shapes eyeing us from below. I reached out to touch the back of one, its skin the color of jade, but as I reached the porpoise dove and my hand touched moonlight where the dorsal fin had been cutting through the silken waters. The dolphins had obviously smelled the flood tide of boyhood in the sea and heard the hormones singing in the boy0scented water. None of us spoke as the porpoises circled us. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak – and then, as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us, moved south where there were fish to be hunted.
"Each of us would remember that night floating on the waves all during our lives. It was the year before we went to high school when we were poised on the slippery brink between childhood and adulthood, admiring our own daring as we floated free from the vigilance and approval of adult eyes, ruled only by the indifference of stars and fate. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set among us the night of the porpoises. ~ Pat Conroy

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

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

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once. ~ Pat Conroy

Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance. ~ Pat Conroy

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue. ~ Pat Conroy

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise. ~ Pat Conroy

The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered. ~ Pat Conroy

music as we danced our way in both ~ Pat Conroy

I had the need to be the good master, but definitely the master, no matter what the cost. ~ 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

I've always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious. ~ Pat Conroy

It seemed to me that their love was based on their common need for order and mannerliness in their lives. Both had endured lives of chaos and incivility in their first marriages, and they provided each other with safe harbor at last. The town of Waterford had ~ Pat Conroy

Beneath the great sisterhood of stars unfurling in the night sky ... ~ 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

I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself. (201) ~ 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

Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy. ~ Pat Conroy

I had loved studying the map because it was a printed explanation of where I had been placed on earth. It was a love song to location, a psalm of praise to both measurement and extent. ~ Pat Conroy

In twenty feet of water, ... the four of us watched the moonlight play on the surface of the water. It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. ~ Pat Conroy

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. ~ Pat Conroy

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been. ~ Pat Conroy

There's no word in the language I revere more than 'teacher.' 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 a teacher. ~ Pat Conroy

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me. ~ Pat Conroy

I'm not the lovable, wonderful, tenderhearted grandfather that you read about in books. I'm grouchy and curmudgeonly, and I have a lot of rules. ~ 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

I've never had anyone's approval, so I've learned to live without it. ~ Pat Conroy

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers. ~ Pat Conroy

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

The two fountains spoke to each other in the pretty speech of falling water ... ~ Pat Conroy

Pat was a complicated and occasionally contradictory man, which is to say he was human, he was flawed, and he was still in the act of self-discovery, of becoming. ~ Nicole Seitz

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher. ~ Pat Conroy

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

Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I remain her enthusiast, her evangelist, her acolyte, and her grateful student. She taught me that cooking and storytelling make the most delightful coconspirators. ~ Pat Conroy

Lightning flashed around the island; thunder played its favorite game of scaring the crap out of all the shivering mortals on the earth below. ~ 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

Beautiful cities have a treacherous nature. ~ Pat Conroy

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

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

My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books. ~ Pat Conroy

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk. ~ Pat Conroy

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men. ~ Pat Conroy

I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character. ~ 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

Some things don't mix. Some things don't mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk. ~ Pat Conroy

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them. ~ Pat Conroy

I WOULD NOT HAVE RETURNED TO this year of 1966 if I had not experienced one of those life-changing encounters on the road that rise up periodically to let us know that fate remains inexorable in its utter strangeness and its capacity for astonishment. At ~ Pat Conroy

I reveled in class discussion and the Socratic method of drawing substance out of calcified minds untrained to think. ~ 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

Mrs. Brown, whose primary job on the island ~ Pat Conroy

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams. ~ Pat Conroy

I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in. ~ Pat Conroy

I learned that politicians are not supposed to help people. They simply listen to people, nod their heads painfully, commiserate at proper intervals, promise to do all they can, and then do nothing. It was very instructive. I could probably have enlisted more action from a bleached jellyfish washed ashore in a seasonal storm. ~ Pat Conroy

I was a distant father. I'd just go off and write. I did the thing that screws up kids more than anything else in America. I went and got myself a little bit famous. ~ Michael Mewshaw

I never once approached greatness, but toward the end of my career, I was always in the game. ~ Pat Conroy

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough. ~ Pat Conroy

Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks. ~ 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

You must appreciate beauty for it to endure. ~ Pat Conroy

Writers of the world, if you've got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. My soul will dance with pleasure, and it'll change the quality of all my waking hours. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for a story to save my own life. Always. It clears the way for me and makes me resistant to all the false promises signified by the ring of power. In every great story, I encounter a head-on collision with self and imagination. ~ Pat Conroy

Knew how to walk in a great city and I did not. Outlander, visitor, I could smell the sea as I entered the lobby of Savannah's apartment, the old familiar scent of the Eastern seaboard roaring up the Avenues. The antique elevator, the size and shape of a coffin, wheezed and groaned its way to the sixth floor. I set my luggage on the marble floor and tried twelve keys before I discovered the four ~ Pat Conroy

If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float. ~ Pat Conroy

Well, at least she doesn't have to be a housewife the rest of her life," she said. "What in the hell do you have against housewives?" I said. "I was raised by one," Savannah said. "And it almost ruined my life." "I got knocked around by a shrimper when I was a kid," said Luke, "but I never blamed the shrimp. ~ Pat Conroy

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention. ~ Pat Conroy

The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells as your mother holds you up, then hands you to your father, who gently tickles the stomach where the cancer will one day form, studies the eyes where melanoma's dark signature is already written along the optic nerve, touches the back where the liver will one day house the cirrhosis, feels the bloodstream that will sweeten itself into diabetes, admires the shape of the head where the brain will fall to the ax-handle of stroke, or listens to your heart, which, exhausted by the fearful ways and humiliations and indecencies of life, will explode in your chest like a light going out in the world. ~ Pat Conroy

I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused. ~ 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

Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth. ~ Pat Conroy

Alertness is a requirement of the writing life, staying nimble on your feet, open to the stories that will rise up and flower around you while you are walking your dog on the beach or taking the kids to soccer practice. The great stories often make their approach with misdirection, camouflage, or smoke screens to hide their passage through your life. ~ Pat Conroy

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position. ~ Pat Conroy

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air. ~ Pat Conroy

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

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

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself. ~ Pat Conroy

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art. ~ Pat Conroy

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss. ~ Pat Conroy

It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts. ~ Pat Conroy

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

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 whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest. ~ Pat Conroy

A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who dies not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission should write book reviews, editorials, or health-insurance policies instead. ~ Pat Conroy

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity. ~ Pat Conroy

I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers. ~ 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

Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges. ~ 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 loved my parents ... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood. ~ 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

This is what makes me crazy in this family, Dad. I don't care that you hit us. I really don't. That's over and there's nothing any of us can do about it. But I can't stand it when I state a simple fact about this family's history and I'm told by you or Mom that it didn't happen. But you've got to know, Dad, and I'm saying this as a son who loves you, that you were a shit to your kids. Not all the time. Not every day. Not every month. But we never knew what would set you off. We never knew when your temper would explode and we'd have the strongest shrimper on the river knocking us around the house. So we learned to be afraid without making a sound. And Mom was a loyal wife to you, Dad. She would never let us tell a soul that you were hitting us. Most of the time, she was like you and would simply tell us it didn't happen the way we remembered it. ~ Pat Conroy

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her. ~ Pat Conroy

Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that 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, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land. ~ Pat Conroy

A school of porpoises broke the surface of the water twenty feet from where we had sat down[...]Each individual porpoise made a sound slightly different from that of any other, so that the school, all twelve of them, flaring and sliding and dancing so near us, formed a kind of woodwind section on the sea's surface or even a single instrument, something unknown and astonishing to man, a celebration of breath itself, of oxygen and sea water and sunlight. They had the eyes of large dogs and their skin was the loveliest, silkiest green imaginable. ~ Pat Conroy

The music acted as a marinade in my weary spirit. ~ Pat Conroy

Always believe in things and people that bring you pleasure. What good does it do to throw those things out the window? ~ Pat Conroy

No city could be more beautiful than Charleston during the brief reign of azaleas, no city on earth. ~ Pat Conroy

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask. ~ Pat Conroy

It's the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much. ~ Pat Conroy

Sergeant Hicks seemed to be laid out in squares as though he were constructed out of cinder blocks. There was a hardness to his body that made his uniform appear to be little more than a paint job. He walked as if each step he took was driving a hated enemy toward a precipice. ~ Pat Conroy

Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up. ~ Pat Conroy