Pat Conroy Quotes

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

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

Great romantics are granted lots of slack.

The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.

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 astonishment.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

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

It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.

The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.

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.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

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.

She had a grocer's faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.

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

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

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.

I was born in the age of "alas".