478 Quotes by Pat Conroy

The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.

I was born in the age of "alas".

The human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

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

In the fantasy of the races conceived in my mind, all blacks were noble people who had struggled against a repressive social order for years and who were finally reaping the tangible rewards of this struggle. All whites, especially myself, were guilty of heinous, extraordinarily brutal crimes against humanity.

Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science.

Reading Tolstoy makes us strive to be better people: better husbands and wives, children, and friends. He tries to teach us how to live by letting us participate in the brimming, storied experiences of his fictional world. Reading Leo Tolstoy, you will encounter a novelist who fell in love with his world and everything he saw and felt in it.

I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.