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 CONROYI 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
-
-
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 -
Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
PAT CONROY -
I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
PAT CONROY -
Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
PAT CONROY -
South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
PAT CONROY -
Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
PAT CONROY -
There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
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 -
I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
PAT CONROY -
I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
PAT CONROY -
Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
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 -
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 CONROY -
When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.
PAT CONROY -
Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
PAT CONROY -
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
PAT CONROY -
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
PAT CONROY -
Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
PAT CONROY -
Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.
PAT CONROY -
I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
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 -
And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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 -
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It 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.
PAT CONROY -
One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
PAT CONROY -
Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
PAT CONROY