Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
PAT CONROYEach of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
-
-
I 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 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 -
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
PAT CONROY -
One does not know where love will take you.
PAT CONROY -
I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
PAT CONROY -
Honor is the presence of God in man.
PAT CONROY -
I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
PAT CONROY -
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
PAT CONROY -
Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
PAT CONROY -
Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
PAT CONROY -
Here’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 CONROY -
Then, 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 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 -
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 -
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.
PAT CONROY