The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
PAT CONROYThe University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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 CONROYThere are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
PAT CONROYAmerican men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
PAT CONROYMusic could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
PAT CONROYThe 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 CONROYA recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
PAT CONROYA family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
PAT CONROYLaughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
PAT CONROYTeach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
PAT CONROYI 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 CONROYHer library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen.
PAT CONROYMan wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
PAT CONROYIf the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
PAT CONROYCameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
PAT CONROYMy 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