Pat Conroy citations

“In the thirty-three years he was in the Marine Corps, Col. Conroy concentrated on the task of defending his country and he did so, exceedingly well. In the next twenty-four years left to him, he put all his efforts into the art of being a terrific father, a loving uncle, a brother of great substance, a beloved grandfather, and a friend to thousands. Out of uniform, the Colonel let his genius for humor flourish. Always in motion he made his rounds in Atlanta each day and no one besides himself knew how many stops he put in during a given day. He was like a bee going from flower to flower, pollinating his world with his generous gift for friendships.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.”

“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.”