Quotes from Pat Conroy

What I wanted most was a life of vigorous quality.

You're worried about your mother dying, aren't you," Leah said, putting her cheek on my forearm. "I can tell." For a moment I hesitated, but I could hear the call for intimacy in her voice, the desire for me to let her enter those grottoes where I tended my own fear of my mother's illness.

Upstaged by a schizophrenic, Dallas said. The story of my life.

There is something glacial, fishlike, and prodigiously remote about Parisians. At the sound of an approaching foreigner, their faces are as bland and expressionless as salamanders.

When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other.

It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.

You the white teacher. I thought you one of the boys." Then she paused. "You gonna drink it?" "Yep." "Teachers drink?" "Yep." "That's good. Oh Gawd, that's so good. I got some gin in that there paper bag when you finish.

My approach to Charleston is always silent and distracted, but I come under full sail, with hissing silk and memories a wing above me in the shapes of the birds I love best

The city of Charleston, in the green feathery modesty of its palms, in the certitude of its style, in the economy and stringency of its lines, and the serenity of its mansions South of Broad Street, is a feast for the human eye.

It has always been difficult for me to face the truth about my childhood because it requires a commitment to explore the lineaments and features of a history I would prefer to forget. For years I did not have to face the demonology of my youth; I made a simple choice not to and found solace in the gentle palmistry of forgetfulness, a refuge in the cold, lordly glooms of the unconscious. But I was drawn back to the history of my family and the failures of my own adult life

I wish I had no history to report. I've pretended for so long that my childhood did not happen. I had to keep it tight, up near the chest. I could not let it out.

music as we danced our way in both

My pre-Yamacraw theory of teaching held several sacred tenets, among these being that the teacher must always maintain an air of insanity, or of eccentricity out of control, if he is to catch and hold the attention of his students. The teacher must always be on the attack, looking for new ideas, changing worn-out tactics, and never, ever falling into patterns that lead to student ennui.

In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them.

Everyone was surprised and enraged by the usurpation of this inalienable Caucasian right to park one's ass on a leather stool and drink a Coke.

she was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets.

I never seemed to learn from joy; I earned my portion of wisdom through sadness.

He had the soul of a fortress and eyes that had peered at the world from battlements too long.

I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well.

Son, you can do more good at Yamacraw than you could ever do in the Peace Corps. And you would be helping Americans, Pat. And I, for one, think it's very important to help Americans.

As her children, we were the trustees of her dazzling evensongs of the imagination, but we did not know that mothers dreamed.

Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves.

Stories have always hunted me down, jumped out at me from the shadows, stalked me and sought me out, grabbed me by the shirtsleeves, and demanded my full attention. I've led a life chock-full of stories, and I know now that you have to be shifty and vigilant and ready to receive their incoming fire. Sometimes it takes the passage of years to reveal their actual meaning or import. They disguise themselves with masks, disfigurements, chimeras, and Trojan horses.

There is no stronger brotherhood than between two boys who discover that both were born to fathers who waged war on their sons.