Quotes from Pat Conroy

Good taste is not something you can be taught. It's not something you obtain in a store or go to college to learn.

No city could be more beautiful than Charleston during the brief reign of azaleas, no city on earth.

To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.

Parisians and polar icecaps have a lot in common except that polar icecaps are warmer to strangers.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

Though I felt like a voyeur to some kind of disaster, my eyes were riveted to the scene ...

Somewhere, the billion dreams of the town since its origin stirred in a maelstrom far from the reach of the shrimpers' nets. Old dreams still burned with the power of their one night on earth, but burned deep and forbidden in regions denied to men.

We've made it back to each other. We've got lots of time to try our hands at restoring the ruins

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.

He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.

Think instead about children. People. Human beings. Feel for once that education is about people—not figures.

Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks.

Humor has always been the redemptive angel in the Conroys's sad history. With this family, I shall never grow hungry from lack of material.

beneath the great sisterhood of stars unfurling in the night sky . . .

Gonzaga was the kind of place you'd not even think about loving until you'd left it for a couple of years.

She had camouflaged the vinegar factory in her character with a great honeycomb along the sills and porches of her public self.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

the hardships and perils that eat around the edges of even the strongest loves.

The two fountains spoke to each other in the pretty speech of falling water . . . .

But sometimes stories hide themselves from writers like trolls under bridges. Then the writers of the world must keep their bodies attuned for the sudden appearance of the story that is powerful enough to change their novels and their lives. They must train themselves to recognize the divine moment when a great story reveals itself.

My life did not really begin until I summoned the power to forgive my father for making my childhood a long march of terror.

Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that's me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.

This room had long served as a retreat from the disharmony and sadness of the first floor, and it was here I had fallen in love with these books and authors in a way that only lifelong readers know and understand. A good movie had never once affected me in the same life-changing way a good book could. Books had the power to alter my view of the world forever. A good movie could change my perceptions for a day.

I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.