Pat Conroy Quotes (58 Quotes)

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.

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.

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.

Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.

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

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

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.

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.

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

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

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

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

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.

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.

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.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

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

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

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

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

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.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

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.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

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

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

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

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.

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.

The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.

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.

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

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.

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.

Graham is as Southern as black-eyed peas, scuppernong wine, she-crab soup, Crimson Tide tailgating and a dog with ticks. She is so relentlessly Southern she makes me feel that I was born in Minnesota

Those wishing to be successful in the market can't ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have. The boomers have redefined every age they've moved through, so there's no reason to believe they will not redefine the stereotypes of what it means to be retired.

I have not talked to Warren or his parents yet. I don't know all the facts there. I'm sure over the next week we'll dive into that and find out where he is in the Corps and academically, and from there make the best decision for everybody.

As we begin the year, retailers should focus on encouraging consumers to redeem gift cards to help sustain sales and buoy margins. Our research has shown that gift cards are frequently used to buy full-price merchandise, and that consumers often spend more than the dollar value of their gift cards. Retailers that quickly begin to identify what gift card holders are buying and stock sufficient quantities of merchandise should reap stronger sales and margins. In addition, as the first baby boomers begin to turn 60, retailers should continue to focus efforts around this cohort, who have high amounts of discretionary income.

The genius of the (original) novel is they were the mother and father of what Atlanta was going to become, ... Would I have written a better novel than Margaret Mitchell Hell no.

I thought I'd stumbled onto Pluto. What I did not realize, I had stumbled into the great lie. They were separate but there was no equality whatsoever.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

I really don't know what to say about Coach Robinson, except that I will come every day with as much pride and passion as I can to repay him.

The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement.

This place means a lot to me. But make no mistake, I am a basketball coach. And I would not come back if I wasn't absolutely convinced that we can win.

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