Pat Conroy’s “Beach Music” Quotes (21 Quotes)

Her view of men was one-dimensional, but not inaccurate: men were prisoners of their genitalia and women were the keepers of the keys to paradise.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

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

I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.

Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

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

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into it's system of laws.

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

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.

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

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.