Pat Conroy: Trending quotes

“No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.”

“Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.”

“Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.”

“Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.”

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”

“Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”

“I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.”

“A story untold could be the one that kills you.”

“I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.”

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”

“I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.”

“I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.”

“Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.”

“When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children”

“There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.”

“Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.”

“Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.”

“Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.”

“These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.”