478 Quotes by Pat Conroy

I reveled in class discussion and the Socratic method of drawing substance out of calcified minds untrained to think.

We Shall Overcome” by Pete Seeger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit.

Good taste is not something you can be taught. It’s not something you obtain in a store or go to college to learn.

I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.

The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest.

I knew about the terrorism of the human spirit and understood that ruthless, immoral forces had planted alien flags in my soul. The plebe system gave cruelty a good name, disguised sadism in the severe raiment of duty.

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class.

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel – the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

I don’t know when my parents began their war against each other – but I do know the only prisoners they took were their children.