Pat Conroy Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

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

Pat Conroy
The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

Pat Conroy
Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.

Pat Conroy
I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.

Pat Conroy
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Pat Conroy
The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

Pat Conroy
To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.'

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
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.

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
The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

Pat Conroy
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

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

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

Pat Conroy
When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

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
The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask.

Pat Conroy
We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.

Pat Conroy
In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

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
But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

Pat Conroy