Quotes by Pat Conroy

About Pat Conroy:

Pat Conroy is a New York Times bestselling author who has written several acclaimed novels and memoirs. Two of his novels, The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, were made into Oscar-nominated films. He is recognized as a leading figure of late-20th century Southern literature.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Pat Conroy

The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell's ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals. If looks alone could...

Pat Conroy

He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.

Pat Conroy

I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of the...

Pat Conroy

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

Pat Conroy

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.

Pat Conroy

Honor is the presence of God in man.

Pat Conroy

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in asto...

Pat Conroy

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

Pat Conroy

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man.

Pat Conroy

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

Pat Conroy

I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when ...

Pat Conroy

it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones a...

Pat Conroy

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

Pat Conroy

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

Pat Conroy

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

Pat Conroy

It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the sk...

Pat Conroy

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.

Pat Conroy

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

Pat Conroy

As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.

Pat Conroy

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.

Pat Conroy

Author Bio

  • NamePat Conroy
  • DescriptionNovelist
  • BornOctober 26, 1945
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionBaseball Player; Novelist
  • WorksThe Great Santini; The Lords Of Discipline; The Prince Of Tides
  • AwardsLillian Smith Book Award