I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara. — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me. — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“There’s the neurotic mother who’s so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me. — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood. — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children. — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“My mother saw in 'Gone With the Wind' the text of liberating herself, ... She took 'Gone With the Wind' as the… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“...Father made a fetish out of performing tasks the correct way. There was an efficiency and economy of his motions that I… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“A portion of guilt is standard issue for southern boys; our whole lives are convoluted, egregious apologies to our mothers because our… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern'… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“Not a single family finds itself exempt from that one haunted casualty who suffered irreparable damage in the crucible they entered at… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River. He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells as your mother holds you up, then hands… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“Never kill anything that’s rare,” my father had said. “I’m lucky I didn’t kill an elephant,” I replied. “You’d have had a… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father. — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“mother, with her upbringing in the primitive Baptist church, believed that converting to Roman Catholicism was a step upward in the social… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever. — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“my folks wouldn't read a book if you put a gun to their dicks. but they read people all day long and always get… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth. — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“We began our life together at a moment of natural self-pity and defeat that left an inimitable impression on both of us. The rejection… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“I always liked your piety, Jack.” “I’m a lot cuter than the women of your generation,” Betsy said, playing up to Capers and Mike.… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“From the beginning I've searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the… — Pat Conroy Copy Share Image
