01c. 1980 ADLosing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
02c. 1980 ADI take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
03c. 1980 ADThe desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
04c. 1980 ADOver 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 apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
05c. 1980 ADIt would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
07c. 1980 ADThe mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
08c. 1980 ADThe pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
09c. 1980 ADAs his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
10c. 1980 ADIn every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
11c. 1980 ADI was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
12c. 1980 ADThere are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
14c. 1980 ADShe understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
15c. 1980 ADCollege was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
16c. 1980 ADI would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
17c. 1980 ADIf any writer in this country has collected as fine and passionate a group of readers as I have, they’re fortunate and lucky beyond anyone’s imagination. It remains a shock to me that I’ve had a successful writing career. Not someone like me; Lord, there were too many forces working against me, too many dark currents pushing against me, but it somehow worked. Though I wish I’d written a lot more, been bolder with my talent, more forgiving of my weaknesses, I’ve managed to draw a magic audience into my circle. They come to my signings to tell me stories, their stories. The ones that have hurt them and made their nights long and their lives harder.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
18c. 1980 ADTo have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
19c. 1980 ADThe teachers of my life saved my life and sent me out prepared for whatever life I was meant to lead. Like everyone else, I had some bad ones and mediocre ones, but I never had one that I thought was holding me back because of idleness or thoughtlessness. They spent their lives with the likes of me and I felt safe during the time they spent with me. The best of them made me want to be just like them. I wanted young kids to look at me the way I looked at the teachers who loved me. Loving them was not difficult for a boy like me. They lit a path for me, and one that I followed with joy.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
20c. 1980 ADMy career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel—the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
22c. 1980 ADLater, 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 soft, uncritical maleness, I never wholly appreciated him. I did not know how to cherish sanctity, and I had no way of honoring, of giving small voice to the praise of such natural innocence, such a generous simplicity. Now I know that a part of me would like to have traveled the world as he traveled it, a jester of burning faith, a fool and a forest prince brimming with the love of God. I would like to walk his southern world, thanking God for oysters and porpoises, praising God for birdsongs and sheet lightning, and seeing God reflected in pools of creekwater and the eyes of stray cats. I would like to have talked to yard dogs and tanagers as if they were my friends and fellow travelers along the sun-tortured highways, intoxicated with a love of God, swollen with charity like a rainbow, in the thoughtless mingling of its hues, connecting two distant fields in its glorious arc. I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and a tongue fluent only in praise.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
24c. 1980 ADI had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
