Pat Conroy Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

  Pat Conroy

  Men, Keys, Paradise

  9 Copy quote

• You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

  Pat Conroy

  Writing, Light, Interesting

  Pat Conroy (2010). “My Losing Season”, p.323, Random House

  11 Copy quote

• But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

  Pat Conroy

  Army, Compassion, Walks

  Pat Conroy (1995). “Beach Music”, Nan A. Talese

  11 Copy quote

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

  Pat Conroy

  Dignity, Paranoia, Found

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Prince of Tides: A Novel”, p.141, Open Road Media

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  Pat Conroy

  Men, Thinking, Years

  Pat Conroy (2002). “My Losing Season”, Nan A. Talese

  22 Copy quote

• A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

  Pat Conroy

  Salt, Rainwater

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Prince of Tides: A Novel”, p.337, Open Road Media

  10 Copy quote

• Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

  Pat Conroy

  Hero, Character, Needs

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Lords of Discipline: A Novel”, p.81, Open Road Media

  23 Copy quote

• Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

  Pat Conroy

  Humanity, Inhumanity

  Pat Conroy (2010). “South of Broad”, p.265, Atlantic Books Ltd

  13 Copy quote

• Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

  Pat Conroy

  Keys, Solitude, Pay

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Prince of Tides: A Novel”, p.80, Open Road Media

  10 Copy quote

• I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.

  Pat Conroy

  Book, Hands, Next

  5 Copy quote

• Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.

  Pat Conroy

  Action, Has Beens

  13 Copy quote

• There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

  Pat Conroy

  Memories, Childhood, Verdict

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Prince of Tides: A Novel”, p.59, Open Road Media

  9 Copy quote

• Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.

  Pat Conroy

  Children, Men, Taught Us

  Pat Conroy (1995). “Beach Music”, Nan A. Talese

  10 Copy quote

• I've always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

  Pat Conroy

  Dream, Hate, Letters

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Prince of Tides: A Novel”, p.140, Open Road Media

  9 Copy quote

• Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.

  Pat Conroy

  Beautiful, Girl, Sweet

  Pat Conroy (2016). “The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and The Prince of Tides: Three Classic Novels in One Collection”, p.1177, Open Road Media

  10 Copy quote

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

  Pat Conroy

  Happiness, Happy, Beautiful

  Pat Conroy (2016). “The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and The Prince of Tides: Three Classic Novels in One Collection”, p.597, Open Road Media

  42 Copy quote

• I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

  Pat Conroy

  Real, Men, Waiting

  Pat Conroy (1986). “The Prince of Tides”, p.542, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

  Pat Conroy

  Age, Prison, Collectives

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Prince of Tides: A Novel”, p.28, Open Road Media

  6 Copy quote

• Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

  Pat Conroy

  Book, Generosity, Forever

  9 Copy quote

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

  Pat Conroy

  Soul, Lambs, Tides

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Prince of Tides: A Novel”, p.9, Open Road Media

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Pat Conroy

  Thinking, Difficult, Wanted

  9 Copy quote

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

  Pat Conroy

  Music, Beautiful, Hurt

  15 Copy quote

• Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

  Pat Conroy

  Book, Heart, Character

  10 Copy quote

• A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.

  Pat Conroy

  Moving, Stories, Living Things

  Pat Conroy (2010). “South of Broad”, p.260, Atlantic Books Ltd

  14 Copy quote

• The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

  Pat Conroy

  Mean, Greatness, Laziness

  Pat Conroy (1995). “Beach Music”, Nan A. Talese

  13 Copy quote

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