Quotes from Pat Conroy

Losing tears along the seam of your own image of yourself. It is a mark of shame that causes internal injury, but no visible damage.

Because our nation is stupid and Hollywood is coarse, there is no one to tell us of the deep and extraordinary beauty of older women. I now see them all around me and am filled with a fierce joy that one of them has come to live in my house.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

My mother's family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, "He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire.

I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

my folks wouldn't read a book if you put a gun to their dicks. but they read people all day long and always get it right.

The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.

I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

If I catch a fish before the sun rises, I have connected myself again to the deep hum of the planet. If I turn on the television because I cannot stand an evening alone with myself or my family, I am admitting my citizenship with the living dead.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world was falling apart.

Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.

A portion of guilt is standard issue for southern boys; our whole lives are convoluted, egregious apologies to our mothers because our fathers have made us such flawed husbands.

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

It was funny how we thought education to be the great gilded key which would solve all problems, eliminate all poverty and disease, eradicate differences between social classes, and bring the children of okra-planters up to par with the children of emperors.

mother, with her upbringing in the primitive Baptist church, believed that converting to Roman Catholicism was a step upward in the social order. Of course she was wrong; when I grew up in the South, a Roman Catholic was the weirdest thing you could be.

I'm an American male, Lowenstein," I said, smiling. "It's not my job to be open." "What exactly is the American male's job?" she asked. "To be maddening. To be unreadable, controlling, bull-headed, and insensitive," I said.

In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game.

The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing.

My mother saw in 'Gone With the Wind' the text of liberating herself, ... She took 'Gone With the Wind' as the central book in her life, and made it the central book in her family.

Don't go yet. Please. Tell me a story, one about us. Tell what it meant. How on earth did it happen? The story, Pat—tell it to me.

And each year, I lose a little bit more of what made me special as a kid. I don't think as much or question as much. I dare nothing. I put nothing on the line. Even my passions are now frayed and pathetic.

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

The party was very painful to me, as parties usually were, and I felt the familiar loneliness of crowds.

She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs.