Quotes from Pat Conroy

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous.

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey.

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

I don't know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

I've never had anyone's approval, so I've learned to live without it.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

Teach them the quiet words 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.

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary