Pat Conroy Quotes

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

~ Pat Conroy

He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.

~ Pat Conroy

Great romantics are granted lots of slack.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

~ 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

She had a grocer's faith in books, they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.

~ 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

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

~ 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

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

I never seemed to learn from joy, I earned my portion of wisdom through sadness.

~ Pat Conroy

The most powerful words in English are, Tell me a story.

~ Pat Conroy

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

~ 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

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

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

Help them, but don't make friends with them.

~ 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

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

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

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

~ 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

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

Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood.

~ Pat Conroy

I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.

~ Pat Conroy

The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

~ Pat Conroy

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

~ Pat Conroy

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

~ Pat Conroy

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

~ Pat Conroy

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

~ 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