Quotes by Pat Conroy

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.

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.

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man.

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

Without music life is a journey through a desert.

A mans only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.

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 didnt sound pretentious or ditzy.

I told my kids when they were little, Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We dont understand how, or we wouldnt do it. But were parents. So somehow were damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

I became a novelist because of Gone With the Wind, or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a Southern novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word Southern because Gone With the Wind set my mothers imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.

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

“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”

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

“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.”