Pat Conroy Quotes
But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.
He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
I've always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.
Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.
Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.
I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it.
She had awakened something in him that had slumbered far too long. Not only did he feel passion, he felt the return of hope.
Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.
These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.
I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.
The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement.
Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.
We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.
I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.
Those wishing to be successful in the market can't ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have.
College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.
