Pat Conroy: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.”

“The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.”

“Man wonders but God decides
When to kill the Prince of Tides.”

“Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.”

“What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts”

“She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.”

“There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.”

“A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.”

“Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.”

“Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.”

“I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.”

“But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.”

“But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.”

“A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.”

“Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation”

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

“There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.”

“When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.”

“Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”