478 Quotes by Pat Conroy

She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.

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.

Like many men and women who make egregious and irretrievable mistakes with their own children, she would redeem herself by becoming the perfect grandmother.

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

From the beginning, I’ve told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I’m the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

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

... the world needs more roses far more than it needs more basketball players.

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