Quotes by Pat Conroy

“My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to sister”

“The mother is only really the mistress of her daughter upon the condition of continually representing herself to her as a model of wisdom and type of perfection”

“But the mothers yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.”

“And it came to me, and I knew what I had to have before my soul would rest. I wanted to belong - to belong to my mother. And in return - I wanted my mother to belong to me.”

“Without music, life is a journey through a desert.”

“The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement.”

“My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.”

“My mother saw in Gone With the Wind the text of liberating herself, ... She took Gone With the Wind as the central book in her life, and made it the central book in her family.”

“The genius of the (original) novel is they were the mother and father of what Atlanta was going to become, ... Would I have written a better novel than Margaret Mitchell? Hell no.”

“Graham is as Southern as black-eyed peas, scuppernong wine, she-crab soup, Crimson Tide tailgating and a dog with ticks. She is so relentlessly Southern she makes me feel that I was born in Minnesota!”

“I thought Id stumbled onto Pluto. What I did not realize, I had stumbled into the great lie. They were separate but there was no equality whatsoever.”

“I always noticed that the actors are always better looking than I am or ever was.”

“Local people seemed very angry for a very long time. It was extraordinary backlash. I was called a liar, I was called every(thing) else. It was enough of a backlash that I moved to Atlanta.”

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

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.

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.

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

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

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 didnt know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didnt 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 its necessary