Pat Conroy quote: "<i>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 beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career</i>"

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was pub...
PAT CONROY

Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I...
PAT CONROY

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.
PAT CONROY

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other peo...
PAT CONROY

I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up...
PAT CONROY

I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about...
PAT CONROY

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my chi...
PAT CONROY

Writing has never been that simple for me.
PAT CONROY

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carol...
PAT CONROY

I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me.
PAT CONROY

When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book...
PAT CONROY

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my fa...
PAT CONROY

A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such ...
PAT CONROY

I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.
PAT CONROY

There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that t...
PAT CONROY

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I w...
PAT CONROY

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to b...
PAT CONROY

Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunit...
PAT CONROY

I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow...
PAT CONROY

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with...
PAT CONROY

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related ...
PAT CONROY

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
PAT CONROY

The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not li...
PAT CONROY

Few people understood the exceptional role the civil rights movement had on the white boys and girls...
PAT CONROY

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave
anything out. I have rea...
PAT CONROY

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to re...
PAT CONROY

Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into c...
PAT CONROY

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.
PAT CONROY

I never read my reviews... not even the good ones. Barbra Streisand once told me, if just one person...
PAT CONROY

Honor is the presence of God in man.
PAT CONROY

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as ...
PAT CONROY

I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.
PAT CONROY

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest...
PAT CONROY

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
PAT CONROY

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to be...
PAT CONROY

Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family.
PAT CONROY

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of So...
PAT CONROY

Local people seemed very angry for a very long time. It was extraordinary backlash. I was called a l...
PAT CONROY

Due to strong consumer acceptance of new products, growth for TV and appliance retailers in 2005 was...
PAT CONROY

As we begin the year, retailers should focus on encouraging consumers to redeem gift cards to help s...
PAT CONROY

Look for retailers to offer innovative promotional campaigns for gift cards this year, because these...
PAT CONROY

As long as I can remember, [costs] continually increased. Periodically, we switched plans to mitigat...
PAT CONROY

I have not talked to Warren or his parents yet. I don't know all the facts there. I'm sure over the ...
PAT CONROY

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
PAT CONROY

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or...
PAT CONROY

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

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue...
PAT CONROY

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspec...
PAT CONROY

What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, i...
PAT CONROY

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewilde...
PAT CONROY

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
PAT CONROY

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.
PAT CONROY

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.
PAT CONROY

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for t...
PAT CONROY

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negat...
PAT CONROY

Man wonders but God decides
When to kill the Prince of Tides.
PAT CONROY

Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver ...
PAT CONROY

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer c...
PAT CONROY

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
PAT CONROY

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.
PAT CONROY

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest...
PAT CONROY

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
PAT CONROY

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young whe...
PAT CONROY

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

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorte...
PAT CONROY

We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields ...
PAT CONROY

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest...
PAT CONROY

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.
PAT CONROY

A story untold could be the one that kills you.
PAT CONROY

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted...
PAT CONROY

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it kn...
PAT CONROY

Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY

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

I thought I'd stumbled onto Pluto. What I did not realize, I had stumbled into the great lie. They w...
PAT CONROY

The genius of the (original) novel is they were the mother and father of what Atlanta was going to b...
PAT CONROY

My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him fro...
PAT CONROY

I always noticed that the actors are always better looking than I am or ever was.
PAT CONROY

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story....
PAT CONROY

If any writer in this country has collected as fine and passionate a group of readers as I have, the...
PAT CONROY

Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fab...
PAT CONROY

There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a...
PAT CONROY

Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts—the ability and willingness t...
PAT CONROY

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming...
PAT CONROY

The human soul can always use a new tradition. Sometimes we require them.
PAT CONROY

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these wo...
PAT CONROY

Stereotypes need to be discarded.
PAT CONROY

The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense...
PAT CONROY

My mother saw in 'Gone With the Wind' the text of liberating herself, ... She took 'Gone With the Wi...
PAT CONROY

Graham is as Southern as black-eyed peas, scuppernong wine, she-crab soup, Crimson Tide tailgating a...
PAT CONROY

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while per...
PAT CONROY

…Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. T...
PAT CONROY

I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood...
PAT CONROY

I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It sta...
PAT CONROY

To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a...
PAT CONROY

I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary,...
PAT CONROY

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

We began our life together at a moment of natural self-pity and defeat that left an inimitable impre...
PAT CONROY

If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a ne...
PAT CONROY

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Collet...
PAT CONROY

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
PAT CONROY

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.
PAT CONROY

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.
PAT CONROY

But, as I watch this film, I often think that the boy did not know what he was really running toward...
PAT CONROY

We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pa...
PAT CONROY

It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had i...
PAT CONROY

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real lif...
PAT CONROY

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary...
PAT CONROY

We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the mo...
PAT CONROY

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.
PAT CONROY

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I woul...
PAT CONROY

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme o...
PAT CONROY

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.
PAT CONROY

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
PAT CONROY

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible nega...
PAT CONROY

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her at...
PAT CONROY

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, driv...
PAT CONROY

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
PAT CONROY

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emble...
PAT CONROY

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homelin...
PAT CONROY

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
PAT CONROY

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.
PAT CONROY

We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one e...
PAT CONROY

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
PAT CONROY

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a...
PAT CONROY

Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are ki...
PAT CONROY

Everyone is handed adversity in life. No one's journey is easy. It's how they handle it that...
KEVIN CONROY

I think the rigors of a TV schedule are brutal and 'Six Feet Under' wasn't a network sch...
FRANCES CONROY

'Six Feet Under' was so much about life. Sure, it had a lot to do with death, but that's...
FRANCES CONROY

I can't form a total picture of things. Because I'm not her.
FRANCES CONROY

Some people ask me, Do they put aging makeup on you? It's just this very nice street makeup.
FRANCES CONROY

Marriage is an exercise in torture.
FRANCES CONROY

I guess you're happy if you have some kind of balance in you. I'm a human being. I have days...
FRANCES CONROY

It's actually meditative to sit in a character for an extended period of time, realizing what yo...
FRANCES CONROY

As you age naturally, your family shows more and more on your face. If you deny that, you deny your ...
FRANCES CONROY

If you choose to be Frankenstein with Botox and plastic surgery, you've bought your own private ...
FRANCES CONROY

It's like real life: We don't get a preview of what's coming up, thank God, and we don&#...
FRANCES CONROY

Britain, along with the U.S.A., is war weary, and after the travesty of Iraq and Afghanistan, has gr...
PAUL CONROY

We're taking these 300 whether we get reimbursed or not.
ANNEMARIE CONROY

We're taking these 300 whether we get reimbursed or not,
ANNEMARIE CONROY

Everyone is on a different frequency.
ANNEMARIE CONROY

I know when I took this job some people had their doubts, but I think we've done quite a lot since I...
ANNEMARIE CONROY

The most important thing is to get children stabilized and get them into schools.
ANNEMARIE CONROY

We've got a bad-ass team, ... I've put together the best and brightest, and these people wouldn't be...
ANNEMARIE CONROY

We have to figure out the best system together. Because no matter who gets hit the most by the quake...
ANNEMARIE CONROY

If the region is prepared then so is San Francisco. We cannot handle a massive event on our own.
ANNEMARIE CONROY

I think we are working with a regional approach: whether the dollars flow to San Francisco or to oth...
ANNEMARIE CONROY

They dropped a bombshell on us. There's less UASI money to be spread around the country, more compet...
ANNEMARIE CONROY

Bruce Wayne is Batman. He became Batman the instant his parents were murdered. Batman needs Bruce, h...
KEVIN CONROY

The valuation disparities are historic. It can't continue this way.
BRIAN CONROY

Techs are back with a big vengeance. People continue to chase momentum.
BRIAN CONROY

A long strike would absolutely have created bigger challenges for hospitals to provide adequate pati...
BRIAN CONROY

The groups that have made money -- the leaders the last few weeks -- are just taking money off the t...
BRIAN CONROY

The stalwarts are tech stocks. It's almost as if they are independent of other concerns that might w...
BRIAN CONROY

She had faith in words, believing in their ability to carry inexpressible messages, trusting that wh...
FRANK CONROY

We didn't get anything going consistently, especially running the ball. It seemed like we never got ...
CONROY HINES

We had both our power play and penalty kill go south.
CRAIG CONROY

We had opportunities in the medium range passing game and didn't convert and maybe could have gotten...
CONROY HINES

It's probably way too late now to book a flight on the Concorde, but people can still get the high-e...
CRAIG CONROY

People fantasize about being a hero and helping someone in trouble. Batman is that fantasy realized ...
KEVIN CONROY

The neighborhoods were littered with construction debris, and paper and plastic trash was strewn abo...
PAUL CONROY

I guess I am basically most comfortable when I'm alone. As a kid, I was very much a loner. I lov...
KEVIN CONROY

Following the incredible success of our collaboration with the Recording Academy in February, and as...
KEVIN CONROY

This campaign reaches Web users where they are -- online. With a changing media landscape, a multi-p...
KEVIN CONROY

With In2TV, we are enabling Web users to experience and interact with television programming in an e...
KEVIN CONROY

This campaign reaches Web users where they are -- online, ... With a changing media landscape, a mul...
KEVIN CONROY

2006 is the year we deliver a video search experience that is as good as what people expect with tex...
KEVIN CONROY

Clearly online video is a mass market phenomenon. It's important for consumers to have the best mean...
KEVIN CONROY

Our biggest concern throughout this process has been that this is going to raise electricity costs i...
KEVIN CONROY

You have to build a mass market for consumer consumption before people think about ownership models.
KEVIN CONROY

consumers directly with the value that matters most to them within our new AOL.com portal experience...
KEVIN CONROY

Everyone is well aware that they have to card everyone in the establishment--from the servers to bar...
MIKE CONROY

I think we played nervous at the beginning and we were tense. We know they're a team that's struggli...
CRAIG CONROY

It might not all be funded in this particular round, but this identifies the needs of the region.
ANNEMARIE CONROY

Technology has been the leader, but people have been looking for the next catalyst to take us throug...
ANTHONY CONROY

I don't think it's industry specific. It's more company specific.
ANTHONY CONROY

I think the small to mid-cap companies are the ones really acting well. You're seeing a broadening o...
ANTHONY CONROY

I think a wake-up call is sometimes needed. Andy was here a long time ... now John's in and we have ...
CRAIG CONROY

A wake-up call, sometimes it's needed. Andy was here a long time. If we didn't make the playoffs, th...
CRAIG CONROY

That weighs on people's mind, and I think Dave thought about it and said, 'I'm going to make a chang...
CRAIG CONROY

We talked as a team that his was a big game. If we won we'd be up by 10 points, if we lost we'd be u...
CRAIG CONROY

If we get them back, that's great. But until then, everyone else is going to pick it up. We can't cr...
CRAIG CONROY

That kind of epitomizes the way the tournament's been going for us.
CRAIG CONROY

We need someone that's impartial, that hasn't been here a long time to get guys going to that next l...
CRAIG CONROY

Irving showed why, hands down, he's the best player in the state.
TIM CONROY

He's been a big part of USA hockey for a long time. It's surprising. He's kind of synonymous with US...
CRAIG CONROY

AIM is the original social network. We're looking for ways for consumers to be able to extend their ...
KEVIN CONROY

A punch like that goes around the league in a hurry, ... But we have talked at length to him in the ...
CRAIG CONROY

The other team was disciplined. We weren't. You give the other team a five-on-three twice [in the se...
CRAIG CONROY

But Kipper was awesome and now maybe everybody in Calgary believes we can give this a real shot. You...
CRAIG CONROY

We were really struggling to score the whole game. We didn't get a lot of open looks. Northport's to...
DENIS CONROY

I thought that we looked pretty good. We were really flying in the first quarter. We wanted to take ...
DENIS CONROY

It was a game of runs. What they did a really good job of was denying the other players, other than ...
DENIS CONROY

It was a three-point game when she fouled out. I really didn't feel like we were out of it until Sam...
DENIS CONROY

Our inexperience showed a little bit. Still, I'm very happy with the effort.
DENIS CONROY

He is probably our go-to receiver right now. He's making plays. He doesn't do it right all the time,...
CONROY HINES

They both have more command of what they're doing. They understand the offense better. Obviously goi...
CONROY HINES

Matt gets the start due to game experience. If the roles were reversed, we would probably start D.A....
CONROY HINES

Honestly, I think we've got four really good running backs. (The freshmen) are great kids and smart ...
CONROY HINES

Pat Conroy

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