Pat Conroy Quotes

I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.

~ 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 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

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

We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

~ Pat Conroy

The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.

~ 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

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

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

Honor is the presence of God in man.

~ 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

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

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

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 was born in the age of alas.

~ 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

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

~ 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

...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand...

~ 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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

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

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

A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.

~ Pat Conroy

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

I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'

~ Pat Conroy

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

~ Pat Conroy

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

~ Pat Conroy

I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

~ Pat Conroy

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

~ Pat Conroy