Quotes from Pat Conroy

Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you.

Time moves funny and it's hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it gives you only one chance.

I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth.

I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.

It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.

My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.

Her secret, we would discover, was that 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.

It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.

Like many men and women who make egregious and irretrievable mistakes with their own children, she would redeem herself by becoming the perfect grandmother.

He treated the stars as though they were love songs written to him by God.

And I was glad she had the camera as a fence to protect herself, an excuse to be invisible. Cameras are a lifesaver for the very shy people who have nowhere else to hide.

Words are pretty, but anyone can talk. Pay attention to the people who perform.