I 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 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’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
PAT CONROYIn Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
PAT CONROYMan wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
PAT CONROYLosing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.
PAT CONROYIt’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.
PAT CONROYHonor is the presence of God in man.
PAT CONROYMen are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
PAT CONROYWithout music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROYI 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 CONROYI’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
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 CONROYExcept for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
PAT CONROYRape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
PAT CONROYWhen mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
PAT CONROYTell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
PAT CONROY