The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
PAT CONROYThe mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
PAT CONROYI’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
PAT CONROYEach divorce is the death of a small civilization.
PAT CONROYMy soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
PAT CONROYI can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
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.
PAT CONROYHappiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
PAT CONROYThe great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.
PAT CONROYHonor is the presence of God in man.
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 CONROYThe University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
PAT CONROYI 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 CONROYHumanity is best described as inhumanity.
PAT CONROYMy wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
PAT CONROYLaughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
PAT CONROYWalking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
PAT CONROY