I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
PAT CONROYI discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
PAT CONROY -
My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
PAT CONROY -
I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
PAT CONROY -
We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
PAT CONROY -
Each 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.
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 would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
PAT CONROY -
Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.
PAT CONROY -
American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
PAT CONROY -
Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
PAT CONROY -
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
PAT CONROY -
My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
PAT CONROY -
From 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 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 -
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