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 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
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But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
PAT CONROY -
You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.
PAT CONROY -
The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
PAT CONROY -
It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.
PAT CONROY -
Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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 -
My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
PAT CONROY -
Honor is the presence of God in man.
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She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
PAT CONROY -
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 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 -
The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn’t know how to ask.
PAT CONROY