Pat Conroy Quotes - Page 6

A story untold could be the one that kills you.

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.

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

Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, "Oh, Mama, do it again!" And I had my earliest memory.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it.

My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

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

My mother raised me to be a writer.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.

Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.

I don't believe in happy families.

Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

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.

I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.

She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs.

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