Pat Conroy Quotes

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.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.

I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one.

Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.

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

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

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

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

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.

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.

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.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

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.

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.

There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.

I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.

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

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.

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

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.

I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.

I never read my reviews... not even the good ones. Barbra Streisand once told me, if just one person in the audience doesn't applaud, it bothers her. I'm the same way. I'd be devastated to read that someone didn't like my work.

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

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

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

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

Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children

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

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.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

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

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

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.

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.