Pat Conroy

“I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day.”

“Time moves funny and it's hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it gives you only one chance.”

“Има само една трудност в това да бъдеш мъж.Не ни учат как да обичаме.Когато една жена ни обича,това но сломява и ние се изпълваме със страх,смирение и целомъдрие.Жените не ни разбират,защото ние никога не отвръщаме на любовта им всеотдайно.Защото нямаме с какво да им отвърнем.”

“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 authentic part of me.”

“Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.”

“An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.”

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

“Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.”

“I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“The words “I love you” could contain all the bloodthirsty despair of the abattoir, all the hopelessness of the most isolated, frozen gulag, all the lurid sadness of death row.”

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

“Again, I know that story is suspect in the high precincts of American fiction, but only because it brings entertainment and pleasure, the same responses that have always driven puritanical spirits at the dinner table wild when the talk turns to sexual intercourse and incontinence.”

“I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.”

“And I was glad she had the camera as a fence to protect herself, an excuse to be invisible. Cameras are a lifesaver for the very shy people who have nowhere else to hide.”

“A breeze lifted off the ocean and several hundred notes from the wind chimes tinkled like ice shaken in silver cups. They altered the mood of the forest the way an orchestra does a theater when it begins tuning up its instruments.”

“Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”

“Because we're human. Like everyone else. And the older we get, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more painful everything becomes. ”

“my folks wouldn't read a book if you put a gun to their dicks. but they read people all day long and always get it right.”

“I will always find myself a prisoner to the divine sublimity of the Eucharist itself." (201)”

“Perfect doesn't just mean happy. Perfect can have lots of different parts. - Niles.”

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

“Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.”

“Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.”

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

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

“Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.”

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

“Voyagers can remove the masks and those sinuous, intricate disguises we wear at home in the dangerous equilibrium of our common lives.”

“From the beginning I've searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through the complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die.”

“Scarlett (O'Hara) taught that one could be hungry and despairing, but not broken and not without resources, spiritual in nature, that precluded one from surrendering without a fight”

“Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.”

“A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who dies not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission should write book reviews, editorials, or health-insurance policies instead.”

“Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.”

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

“Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.”

“My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.”

“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 I were being studied by flowers.”

“She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.”

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

“I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers.”

“He treated the stars as though they were love songs written to him by God.”

“It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.”

“My irritation with Niles was growing, though. I had always thought the quiet man was the most overrated form of human life".”

“We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, "Oh, Mama, do it again!" And I had my earliest memory.”

“When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.”

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