Pat Conroy

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

— Pat Conroy

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

— Pat Conroy

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

— Pat Conroy

“Don’t go yet. Please. Tell me a story, one about us. Tell what it meant. How on earth did it happen? The…

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

— Pat Conroy

“They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull .”

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of…

— Pat Conroy

“You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write.…

— Pat Conroy

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments…

— Pat Conroy

“When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to…

— Pat Conroy

I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the…

— Pat Conroy

“It ratified a theory of mine that great writing could sneak up on you, master of a thousand disguises: prodigal kinsman, messenger…

— Pat Conroy

“As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the…

— Pat Conroy

“Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing…

— Pat Conroy

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

— Pat Conroy

I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

— Pat Conroy

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

— Pat Conroy

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

— Pat Conroy

I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good…

— Pat Conroy

“My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.”

— Pat Conroy

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

“I went up to the terrace again and looked out on the tawny, many-alleyed city. At night it looked carved from brown…

— Pat Conroy

“I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.”

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

“It all makes more sense when I'm out here alone," he smiled. "I can talk myself into anything.”

— Pat Conroy

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get…

— Pat Conroy

A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets…

— Pat Conroy

I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

— Pat Conroy

“The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good…

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

“that life was good, but it was hard; we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the preparation.”

— Pat Conroy

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

— Pat Conroy

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

“Here, open wide and let it slide,” he said, tilting a half-shell into Ben’s mouth. The oyster hit Ben’s mouth. It felt…

— Pat Conroy