Quotes from Pat Conroy

We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.

That's what a good book does-it puts readers on their knees. It makes you want to believe in a world you just read about-the one that will make you feel different about the world you thought you lived in, the world that will never be the same.

The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.

I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting.

A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who dies not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission should write book reviews, editorials, or health-insurance policies instead.

Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. I am more fabulist than historian, but I will try to give you the insoluble, unedited terror of youth. I betray the integrity of my family's history by turning everything, even sadness, into romance. There is no romance in this story; there is only the story.

A good movie had never once affected me in the same life-changing way a good book could. Books had the power to alter my view of the world forever. A great movie could change my perceptions for a day.

If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood.

The American male is a quivering mass of insecurities. If a woman makes the mistake of loving him, he will make her suffer terribly for her utter lack of taste. I don't think men can ever forgive women for loving them to the exclusion of all others.

As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers.

I learned that politicians are not supposed to help people. They simply listen to people, nod their heads painfully, commiserate at proper intervals, promise to do all they can, and then do nothing. It was very instructive. I could probably have enlisted more action from a bleached jellyfish washed ashore in a seasonal storm.

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

No man or woman has the right to humiliate children, even in the sacrosanct name of education. No one has the right to beat children with leather straps, even under the sacred auspices of all school boards in the world.

We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

the forlorn appearance assumed by all houses that have lost their people.

She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.

At the top the bridge with the stars shining above the harbor, I look to the north and wish again that there were two lives apportioned to every man and woman.

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

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

Take the local, take the express, don't get off till you reach success -- Sidney Rosen (Prince Of Tides)

Yet I can walk away from best friends and rarely think of them again. I can close a door and not look back. There's something about my soul that's always ready to go, to break camp, to unfold the road map, to leave at night when the house inspection's done and the civilians are asleep and the open road is calling...

She had a grocer's faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.