Pat Conroy Quotes

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what 'tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

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.

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

The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.

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

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.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

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

My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.

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

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

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

I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

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

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

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

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.

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

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

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.

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

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

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

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life 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.

Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

... silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.

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

Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.

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

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

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

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

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

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.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

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