Quotes by Pat Conroy

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

Throughout my career I’ve lived in constant fear that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I’d have nothing to say, that I’d be laughed at, humiliated—and I’m old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I’ll ever write. As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I’m supposed to write—the grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don’t quite know it. But I trust I’ll begin to know it soon.

Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.

I’ve always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people’s books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer’s imagination.

Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers.

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

I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.

The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: introit, offertory, liturgy, movable feast, the minor elevation, the lavabo, the apparition of Lourdes, and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book Ive ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure.

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

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

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

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

As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

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

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

The choices I didn’t make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.

She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.

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