Pat Conroy Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Pat Conroy
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.

Pat Conroy
Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses?

Pat Conroy
The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement.

Pat Conroy
The wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.

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

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
Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

Pat Conroy
Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.

Pat Conroy
I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

Pat Conroy
It is the secret life that sustains me now, and as I reach the top of that bridge I say it in a whisper, I say it as a prayer, as regret, and as praise. I can't tell you why I do it or what it means, but each night when I drive toward my southern home and my southern life, I whisper these words: 'Lowenstein, Lowenstein.

Pat Conroy
The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave

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

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

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

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 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
We spent our entire childhoods in the service of our country, and no one even knew we were there.

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

Pat Conroy
Of the Yamacraw children, I can say little. I don't think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their birth.

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
I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

Pat Conroy
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.

Pat Conroy
She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

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

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

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

Pat Conroy