Quotes from Pat Conroy

It all makes more sense when I'm out here alone, he smiled. I can talk myself into anything.

I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and with a tongue fluent only in praise.

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.

And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times.

I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.

She had awakened something in him that had slumbered far too long. Not only did he feel passion, he felt the return of hope.

The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.

Father made a fetish out of performing tasks the correct way. There was an efficiency and economy of his motions that I always found a pleasure to watch and a pain to mimic.

I was born in the age of alas.

I mourn for the quicksilvery racehorse passage of time. Its swiftness has caught me with the same ineffable start that comes to every man and woman who lives long enough. It remains as the single great surprise of any life. In

Art is one of the few places where talent and madness can actually go to squirrel away inside each other.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

Political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry.

it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress .

I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day.

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

It was a time in my life when many things bored me deeply and I hungered for beauty and those realms of pure elation granted to those who had the imagination to know what to look for and how to find it.

The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest.

Before I met the Jesuits, I'd never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.

I envy the tireless intimacy of women's friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.