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 CONROYOne can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
-
-
When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
PAT CONROY -
Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
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 -
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 -
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 -
And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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 -
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 -
Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
PAT CONROY -
I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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 -
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 CONROY -
Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.
PAT CONROY -
We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
PAT CONROY -
Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
PAT CONROY






