Quotes from Pat Conroy

I want to be lovely in death...

blitzkrieg.

made her unapproachable, apart. She was one of those girls who pass through your life leaving secret wreckage, but no visible wake. You remember her, but for all the wrong reasons.

I taught my boys that losing well was a gift, but that winning well was the stuff of authentic manhood. Losing, I told them, was good for your sense of proportion.

realized his wounds had enhanced his manhood and his own sense of himself.

one afflicted with all the hurt and burden and grandeur of memory. I wondered if they could see the difference.

Sensing that Mrs. Brown was preparing to launch a verbal grenade but not knowing exactly how to divert the attack, I simply shrugged my shoulders and prepared for the worst.

They strode with purpose, armed with resolution, whereas everything I did seemed insubstantial and forced. I longed for engagement, intrusion, and a little more Mardi Gras than Lent in my life.

She pulled a half pint of Jack Daniel's out of her purse and poured me a shot in a small paper cup she took from the water cooler. "Dr. Jack always makes house calls and the boy cures what ails you.

She was a poetess of profanity, an oracle of epithets who could outcuss a bathroom wall. Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility

There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous. But there is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss. The great secret of athletics is that you can learn more from losing than winning.

This book demonstrates again and again that there is no passion more rewarding than reading itself, that it remains the best way to dream and to feel the sheer carnal joy of being fully and openly alive.

In no way had my mother with her air of gentility and fine breeding prepared me for the Ida Skimberrys of the world.

I walked back across the parade ground beneath the shadows of the massive oak trees on the southern fringe of the parade ground and the two howitzer cannons, Barnwell and Freeman, named for the two Institute cadets who fired the first shots on Fort Sumter to begin the Civil War.

news from the king of seasons. Strength was my gift; it was also

concolorous

I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don't adhere.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I remain her enthusiast, her evangelist, her acolyte, and her grateful student. She taught me that cooking and storytelling make the most delightful coconspirators.

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.

I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.