Pat Conroy Quotes

Her view of men was one-dimensional, but not inaccurate: men were prisoners of their genitalia and women were the keepers of the keys to paradise.

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, writer...

My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.

Take the local, take the express, don't get off till you reach success -- Sidney Rosen (Prince Of Tides)

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

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 didn'...

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the safe protectorate of his s...

Man wonders but God decidesWhen to kill the Prince of Tides.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.

In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some...

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them...

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 cl...

I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.

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.