478 Quotes by Pat Conroy

College was to teach me that I was one of life’s journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

The past was one country where I tried to limit the number of free trips.

Those wishing to be successful in the market can’t ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have.

Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. I am more fabulist than historian, but I will try to give you the insoluble, unedited terror of youth. I betray the integrity of my family’s history by turning everything, even sadness, into romance. There is no romance in this story; there is only the story.

Son, you can do more good at Yamacraw than you could ever do in the Peace Corps. And you would be helping Americans, Pat. And I, for one, think it’s very important to help Americans.

You’re going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It’s the hardest role in the world.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary.

And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times.