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 CONROYMy wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
-
-
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 -
Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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 -
Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
PAT CONROY -
A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
PAT CONROY -
When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
PAT CONROY -
Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
PAT CONROY -
You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.
PAT CONROY -
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
PAT CONROY -
American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
PAT CONROY -
My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
PAT CONROY -
My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
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 -
The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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 -
A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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 -
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 -
Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
PAT CONROY -
The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It’s a crowning achievement of his own storied career.
PAT CONROY -
The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
PAT CONROY -
Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
PAT CONROY -
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 -
My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
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 do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.
PAT CONROY