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 CONROYMama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
-
-
Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.
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 -
Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
PAT CONROY -
One does not know where love will take you.
PAT CONROY -
Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.
PAT CONROY -
Good writing … 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 -
I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
PAT CONROY -
Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
PAT CONROY -
Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
PAT CONROY -
There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
PAT CONROY -
Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
PAT CONROY -
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY -
The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.
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 -
Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
PAT CONROY