Quotes from Pat Conroy

Lightning flashed around the island; thunder played its favorite game of scaring the crap out of all the shivering mortals on the earth below.

But I had married a fine and comely girl, and with brilliance and craft and all instincts of self-preservation jettisoned, I succeeded over the years, through neglect, coldness, and betrayal, in turning her into the exact image of my mother.

i was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities.

San Francisco is a city that requires a fine pair of legs, a city of cliffs misnamed as hills, honeycombed with a fine webbing of showy houses that cling to the slanted streets with the fierceness of abalones.

I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself. (201)

My own tears seemed landlocked and frozen in a glacier I could not reach or touch within me.

My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.

Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination.

I do not think I was a hothead—not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life.

It's the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.

I've written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they've been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts—the ability and willingness to change his mind and do it in an orderly, well-reasoned way.

I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.

The choices I didn't make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.

Reading Tolstoy makes us strive to be better people: better husbands and wives, children, and friends. He tries to teach us how to live by letting us participate in the brimming, storied experiences of his fictional world. Reading Leo Tolstoy, you will encounter a novelist who fell in love with his world and everything he saw and felt in it.

Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

As we took the court for the second half, I made a secret now to myself that I would never listen to a single thing that Mel Thompson said to me again. I would obey him and honor him and follow him, but I would not let him touch the core of me again. He was my coach, but I was my master.

The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell's ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals. If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms.

Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.

It ratified a theory of mine that great writing could sneak up on you, master of a thousand disguises: prodigal kinsman, messenger boy, class clown, commander of artillery, altar boy, lace maker, exiled king, peacemaker, or moon goddess.

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.