When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.
PAT CONROYPut 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
-
-
If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
PAT CONROY -
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 -
I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
PAT CONROY -
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,
PAT CONROY -
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY -
Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
PAT CONROY -
Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
PAT CONROY -
Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
PAT CONROY -
Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
PAT CONROY -
A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
PAT CONROY -
I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
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 -
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 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.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY