Quotes by Pat Conroy

“Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.”

“Help them, but don't make friends with them.”

“Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.”

“Throughout my career I’ve lived in constant fear that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I’d have nothing to say, that I’d be laughed at, humiliated—and I’m old enough to know that fear will follow me...”

“I’ve always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people’s books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots t...”

“I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.”

“Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the appari...”

“The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.”

“In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.”

“I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.”

“The choices I didn’t make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.”

“You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.”

“One must always forgive another's passion.”

“I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.”

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

“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 liv...”

“From the beginning, I’ve told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me ...”

“Wasn't Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year?" "Yes, but the airport's perfectly safe.”

“Though I’ve never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones...”

“The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.”