A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
PAT CONROYA family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
PAT CONROYWithout music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROYMy soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
PAT CONROYBut even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
PAT CONROYI stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.
PAT CONROYI 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 CONROYThen, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
PAT CONROYOnce I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.
PAT CONROYA story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
PAT CONROYCharleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
PAT CONROYWhen men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.
PAT CONROYA library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
PAT CONROYPolitical 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 CONROYOnce 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.
PAT CONROYHere’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.
PAT CONROYOne of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
PAT CONROY