Pat Conroy Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.

One must always forgive another's passion.

I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

You're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world.

i was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities.

A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out.

A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America.

Wasn't Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year?" "Yes, but the airport's perfectly safe.

Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.

There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help.

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers

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

I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.

Because I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.

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

The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

I was born in the age of "alas".

...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand...

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

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.

Without music life is a journey through a desert.

A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.

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