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 CONROYGood 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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.
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 -
Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
PAT CONROY -
Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
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 -
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 -
In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
PAT CONROY -
There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
PAT CONROY -
Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…
PAT CONROY -
I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
PAT CONROY -
Honor is the presence of God in man.
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 -
Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
PAT CONROY






