Pat Conroy Quotes

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

~ Pat Conroy

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

~ Pat Conroy

The choices I didn’t make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.

~ 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

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

~ Pat Conroy

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

~ 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

You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.

~ 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

One must always forgive another's passion.

~ 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 admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

~ Pat Conroy

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

~ Pat Conroy

You're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world.

~ Pat Conroy

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.

~ Pat Conroy

What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts

~ Pat Conroy

i was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities.

~ Pat Conroy

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

~ Pat Conroy

A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out.

~ Pat Conroy

From the beginning, I’ve told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I’m the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.

~ Pat Conroy

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

~ Pat Conroy

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.

~ Pat Conroy

Wasn't Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year? Yes, but the airport's perfectly safe.

~ Pat Conroy

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation

~ Pat Conroy

Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.

~ 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 Bear had once confided to me that Durrell's ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals. If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms.

~ Pat Conroy

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

~ Pat Conroy

I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

~ Pat Conroy

I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization.

~ Pat Conroy

Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.

~ Pat Conroy

Though I’ve never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones, those who must teach in public schools when the whole nation seems at war with the very essence of teaching.

~ Pat Conroy

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

~ 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

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

~ Pat Conroy

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

~ Pat Conroy

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

~ Pat Conroy