Pat Conroy quotes
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“Without music, life is a journey through a desert.”
-- Pat ConroySource : Pat Conroy (1995). “Beach Music”, Nan A. Talese
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“I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.”
-- Pat ConroySource : FaceBook post by Pat Conroy from Oct 15, 2013
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“Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.”
-- Pat Conroy -
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“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 -
“The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'”
-- Pat Conroy -
“Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.”
-- Pat Conroy -
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“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 ConroySource : FaceBook post by Pat Conroy from Dec 19, 2013
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“Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.”
-- 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 -
“Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”
-- Pat Conroy -
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“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 ConroySource : Pat Conroy (2010). “The Prince of Tides: A Novel”, p.459, Open Road Media
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“Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.”
-- Pat ConroySource : Pat Conroy (2010). “The Lords of Discipline: A Novel”, p.21, Open Road Media
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“These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary”
-- Pat Conroy -
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“The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave”
-- Pat Conroy -
“The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”
-- Pat Conroy -
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“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 -
“No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.”
-- Pat Conroy -
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“I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“…Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. 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…Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.”
-- Pat Conroy -
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“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’†She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.”
-- Pat Conroy -
“There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.”
-- Pat Conroy -
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“Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.”
-- 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 ConroySource : Pat Conroy (1995). “Beach Music”, Nan A. Talese
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“South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.”
-- Pat ConroySource : Pat Conroy (2016). “A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life”, p.61, Nan A. Talese
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