Quotes from Pat Conroy

This time Ben swallowed faster as though he were ingesting his own saliva. Speed, he thought, was the secret behind the enigma of why men would torture themselves by placing these raw quivering bivalves on their tongues. He couldn't rid his mind of the image that he was eating shelled snot.

As a town, we had made the error of staying small—and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

La manière sudiste? dit-elle. - L'immortelle expression chère à ma mère. Nous rions quand la douleur se fait trop forte. Nous rions quand la pitié de l'humaine condition devient trop pitoyable. Nous rions quand il n'y a rien d'autre à faire.

Growth of the Soil by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. The copy he gave me had once belonged to Norma M. Saylor, who lived in Palmyra, New Jersey.

Every time I eat grits, it becomes perfectly clear to me why the South lost the war.

It's dangerous to write about what you don't know, I said. Ledare got up to go and said, It's dangerous not to.

I had loved studying the map because it was a printed explanation of where I had been placed on earth. It was a love song to location, a psalm of praise to both measurement and extent.

Help them, but don't make friends with them.

The only other people who shared this piece of earned intelligence were my father, my brother, and those anonymous fishermen whose innocent footprints undermined the numinous rarity of my father's secret hermitage.

we tensed for the moment of entry, the butterflies swarming in their familiar, nervous dance in our stomachs;

The music acted as a marinade in my weary spirit.

Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds.

When she awoke to her memorial headache, she would find my grandfather on his knees, praying for her sweet, boozy soul.

Yet all around me, in the grinning faces of my students, I could see a crime, so ugly that it could be interpreted as a condemnation of an entire society, a nation be damned, a history of wickedness—these children before me did not have a goddam chance of sharing in the incredible wealth and affluence of the country that claimed them, a country that failed them, a country that needed but did not deserve deliverance.

and wondered when it was, the exact moment, that I had lost her, that I let her fall too far away from me, that I betrayed the laughing girl and let the world have her. The photograph cut into my heart and I began to read the letter aloud.

Teaching is a record of failures. But the glory of teaching is in the attempt.

She wore defeat like a piece of cheap jewelry. "Worshiping them. Anointing them with oil, Mrs. Gervais," I said.

Guilt's my mainstream," I explained. "The central theme of my life. The Church laid a foundation of pure guilt inside me. They raised a temple in the soft center of a child. Floors were paved with guilt. Statues of saints were carved out of great blocks of it.

tolerated playfulness at church not at all. At every Mass, she wore her game face for a crucifixion as though she were an actual eyewitness to the death of Jesus each time she knelt in her pew.

she will die the way all old people in America die . . . from humiliation, incontinence, boredom, and neglect.

Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly, as your spirit moves through me.

Great romantics are granted lots of slack.

I want them to take from you the knowledge of how to be the gentlest, the most perfect brother.                                         Savannah

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story'.