Home > Author > Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy QUOTES

Pat Conroy QUOTES

1 " I 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 Conroy , The Lords of Discipline

2 " I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it. "

― Pat Conroy , The Great Santini

3 " 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 , South of Broad

4 " The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean. "

― Pat Conroy , South of Broad

5 " Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration. "

― Pat Conroy , The Lords of Discipline

6 " Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage. "

― Pat Conroy , The Prince of Tides

7 " 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. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary "

― Pat Conroy , My Losing Season: A Memoir

8 " 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, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world. "

― Pat Conroy

9 " 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. If 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 Conroy , My Reading Life

10 " Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next. "

― Pat Conroy

11 " In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers. "

― Pat Conroy , My Reading Life

12 " Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well. "

― Pat Conroy , The Lords of Discipline

13 " You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up. "

― Pat Conroy , The Prince of Tides

14 " A library could show you everything if you knew where to look. "

― Pat Conroy , My Reading Life

15 " Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science. "

― Pat Conroy , The Lords of Discipline

16 " I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in. "

― Pat Conroy , The Lords of Discipline

17 " Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life. "

― Pat Conroy , A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

18 " I envy the tireless intimacy of women’s friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength. "

― Pat Conroy , A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

19 " Few people understood the exceptional role the civil rights movement had on the white boys and girls of the South. Bill Clinton would never have become who he was without the shining example of Martin Luther King. The same is true of Jimmy Carter and Fritz Hollings and Richard and Joe Riley. Imagine this: you’re a little white kid and you watch firehoses turned on people who don’t seem to be hurting anyone, and fierce dogs being tuned on young men who carry signs about freedom. We white kids grew up watching movies and TV and guess what we had learned to do? We had learned to tell the good guys from the bad guys. "

― Pat Conroy , A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

20 " It's politics . . . It makes everybody stupid. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean. "

― Pat Conroy , Beach Music