But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
PAT CONROYEvil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Cameras 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 CONROY -
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 CONROY -
I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
PAT CONROY -
A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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 -
I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me,
PAT CONROY -
Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.
PAT CONROY -
When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
PAT CONROY -
Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.
PAT CONROY -
Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
PAT CONROY -
I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
PAT CONROY -
Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
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 -
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 -
One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
PAT CONROY






