478 Quotes by Pat Conroy

Humor has always been the redemptive angel in the Conroys’s sad history. With this family, I shall never grow hungry from lack of material.

- La manière sudiste? dit-elle.- L'immortelle expression chère à ma mère. Nous rions quand la douleur se fait trop forte. Nous rions quand la pitié de l'humaine condition devient trop pitoyable. Nous rions quand il n'y a rien d'autre à faire.

Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.

There is no city on Earth quite like Charleston. From the time I first came there in 1961, it’s held me in its enchanter’s power, the wordless articulation of its singularity, its withheld and magical beauty. Wandering through its streets can be dreamlike and otherworldly, its alleyways and shortcuts both fragrant and mysterious, yet as haunted as time turned in on itself.

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.

Political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry.

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself." (201)

By carefully editing what I thought would harm her, I turned my childhood into something as glamorous as forbidden fruit.