Quotes by Pat Conroy

“Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.”

“I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well.”

“In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing kee...”

“I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.”

“I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.”

“Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a...”

“Read the great books, gentlemen, Mr. Monte said one day. Just the great ones. Ignore the others. Theres not enough time.”

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

“The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling ...”

“Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, wri...”

“The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, Iv...”

“I dont know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.”

“My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, a...”

“I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, ...”

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

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

“Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you ...”

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

“The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.”

“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...”