Quotes by Pat Conroy

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

“Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of sci...”

“I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic.”

“This [sand-dollar hunting] had become one of our rituals together, and though she would search for other varieties of shells when I was out of town or unable to see her, she would wait until I appe...”

“I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnes...”

“It was in her garden that whatever physical grace Abigail St. Croix possessed asserted itself. She moved among her flowers with consummate natural fluidity, enjoying the incommunicable pleasures of...”

“I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven meth...”

“Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and thats me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.”

“It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.”

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

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

“Ive never had anyones approval, so Ive learned to live without it.”

“I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individu...”

“Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life.”

“I envy the tireless intimacy of womens friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.”

“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.”

“It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much...”

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

“The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.”

“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”