Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
PAT CONROYTell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
PAT CONROYWe 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 CONROYWilliam Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book,
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 CONROYI loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
PAT CONROYI discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
PAT CONROYFew things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.
PAT CONROYI can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
PAT CONROYThen 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 CONROYAnyone 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.
PAT CONROYMusic could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
PAT CONROYA story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
PAT CONROYCharleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
PAT CONROYFrom the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
PAT CONROYYou touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.
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 CONROY