Quotes by Pat Conroy

“...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand...”

“I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, an...”

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

“Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.”

“I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind...”

“I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.”

“We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.”

“In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you ...”

“When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ard...”

“Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.”

“If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.”

“I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.”

“Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, "the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authenti...”

“Before I met the Jesuits, Id never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.”

“The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle...”

“As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if ...”

“Without music life is a journey through a desert.”

“A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.”

“I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that di...”

“I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.”