Pat Conroy quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Pat Conroy on Wise Famous Quotes.

I'm sorry your bad dream died," I said as I left her and walked toward the gate. "And I'm sorry I ever met you, Annie Kate.

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

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

I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.

Man wonders but God decides
When to kill the Prince of Tides.

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

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

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

The party was very painful to me, as parties usually were, and I felt the familiar loneliness of crowds.

I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.

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

Art is one of the few places where talent and madness can actually go to squirrel away inside each other.

She wore defeat like a piece of cheap jewelry. "Worshiping them. Anointing them with oil, Mrs. Gervais," I said.

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

music as we danced our way in both

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

My folks wouldn't read a book if you put a gun to their dicks. but they read people all day long and always get it right.

A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

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

The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

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

... it was but one of the things that made friendship with me an ambivalent enterprise.

According to Margaret Mitchell, the Civil War destroyed a civilization of unsurpassable amenity, chivalry, and grace.

Great romantics are granted lots of slack.

One must always forgive another's passion.

She was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets.

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

Because we're human. Like everyone else. And the older we get, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more painful everything becomes.

My irritation with Niles was growing, though. I had always thought the quiet man was the most overrated form of human life.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

life was good, but it was hard; we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the preparation.

I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me.

Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.

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

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

You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.

I want to be lovely in death...

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

Surface my wife's most vicious

Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that's me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

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

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.

Words are pretty, but anyone can talk. Pay attention to the people who perform.

Single insincere phoneme, piss me off? Why can't I ignore her,

A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America.

Writing has never been that simple for me.

Even then, her interior life was far more important to her than her external one.

I was becoming convinced that the world was a colorful, variegated grab bag full of bastards. But

I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown.

Mrs. Brown, whose primary job on the island

Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.

I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.

Humor has always been the redemptive angel in the Conroys's sad history. With this family, I shall never grow hungry from lack of material.

The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing.

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.

Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name.

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

My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.

The forlorn appearance assumed by all houses that have lost their people.

On its own, my spirit seemed to relax, like a folding chair let out by a pool.

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

Losing tears along the seam of your own image of yourself. It is a mark of shame that causes internal injury, but no visible damage.

[P]enmanship as pretty as a row of tulips

It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.

I'm not mentally ill," she insisted, fidgeting in her chair. "I'm just very neurotic and I'm always falling in love with assholes.

I loved my parents ... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

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

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.

If Henry Wingo had not been a violent man, I think he would have made a splendid father.

Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.

Take the local, take the express, don't get off till you reach success
Sidney Rosen (Prince Of Tides)

Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses?

There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help.

As a teacher, I had been a happy man. Now, I was only a diminished one.

Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.

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.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course.

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.

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

I don't believe in happy families.

Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.

My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.

The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement.

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

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

Everyone was surprised and enraged by the usurpation of this inalienable Caucasian right to park one's ass on a leather stool and drink a Coke.