Pat Conroy Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.

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

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

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.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.

Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

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.

My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.

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

Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.

The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you.

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

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

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

William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book, The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It's a crowning achievement of his own storied career.

Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.