Pat Conroy
109 quotes
Biography
"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
"Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration."
"I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it."
"I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment."
"Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage."
"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."
"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."
"The Citadel cherishes the belief that the more hardship endured by the young man, the higher the quality of the person who graduates from the system. The Citadel devised a formula years ago to improve the quality of men who walked through her gates. The formula begins with the plebe system. One thing is certain. The plebe system is calculated to be, and generally succeeds in being, a nine month journey through hell. The freshman is beaten, harassed, ridiculed, and humiliated by the upperclassmen who concur and believe in the traditions of the school. Under the pressure of this system, the freshman, in theory, becomes hardened to the savage hardships of the world. Life is tough, the system says, and we are going to make life so tough for you this year that when your marriage dissolves, your child dies unexpectedly, or your platoon is decimated in a surprise attack, you can never say The Citadel didn't prepare you for the worst in life."
"The Southern school superintendent is a kind of remote deity who breathes the purer air of Mount Parnassus. The teachers see him only on those august occasions when they need to be reminded of the nobility of their calling. The powers of a superintendent are considerable. He hires and fires, manipulates the board of education, handles a staggering amount of money, and maintains the precarious existence of the status quo."
"Lightning flashed around the island; thunder played its favorite game of scaring the crap out of all the shivering mortals on the earth below."
"Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name."
"There were these deep, serious thoughts I sometimes had to drive from my head like flocks of pesky starlings. I was too pragmatic and impatient to let such thoughts flog me into impotence, yet I sincerely needed a working philosophy on which to hang my hat. After the Halloween trip, one began to form and crystallize without my knowledge, and when I finally acknowledged its presence, it was already a part of me: simply, that life was good, but it was hard; we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the preparation."
"And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times."
"I learned that politicians are not supposed to help people. They simply listen to people, nod their heads painfully, commiserate at proper intervals, promise to do all they can, and then do nothing. It was very instructive. I could probably have enlisted more action from a bleached jellyfish washed ashore in a seasonal storm."
"Teaching is a record of failures. But the glory of teaching is in the attempt."
"During the entire period of my banishment and trial, I wanted to tell Piedmont and Bennington that what was happening between us was not confined to Beaufort, South Carolina. I wanted to tell them about the river that was rising quickly, flooding the marshes and threatening the dry land. I wanted them to know that their day was ending. When I saw them at the trial, I knew that they were the soldiers of the rear guard, captains of a doomed army retreating through the snow and praying that the quick, dark wolves, waiting in the cold, would come no closer. They were old men and could not accept the new sun rising out of the strange waters. The world was very different now."
"The South of humanity and goodness is slowly rising out of the fallen temple of hatred and white man's nationalism. The town retains her die-hards and nigger-haters and always will. Yet they grow older and crankier with each passing day. When Beaufort digs another four hundred holes in her plentiful grave-yards, deposits there the rouged and elderly corpses, and covers them with the sandy, lowcountry soil, then another whole army of the Old South will be silenced and not heard from again. The religion of the Confederacy and apartheid will one day be subdued by the passage of years. The land will be the final arbiter of human conflict; no matter how intense the conflict, the victory of earth and grave will be complete."
"The full moon hung low, a fresh coin that threw its silver grandly on the water in a ribbon that dazzled for a thousand miles."
"I've never had anybody's approval, so I've learned to live without it."
"Always believe in things and people that bring you pleasure. What good does it do to throw those things out the window?"
"Sports show you your limits. Sports teach humility. Sooner or later the athlete becomes humble no matter how good he is. But he plays until he has reached as high as he can."
"I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting."
"It was dangerous to have a sadist in the barracks, especially one who justified his excesses by religiously invoking the sacrosanct authority of the plebe system. The system contained its own high quotient of natural cruelty, and there was a very thin line between devotion to duty, that is, being serious about the plebe system, which was an exemplary virtue in the barracks, and genuine sadism, which was not. But I had noticed that in the actual hierarchy of values at the Institute, the sadist like Snipes rated higher than someone who took no interest in the freshmen and entertained no belief in the system at all. In the Law of the Corps it was better to carry your beliefs to an extreme than to be faithless. For the majority of the Corps, the only sin of the sadist was that he believed in the system too passionately and applied his belief with an overabundant zeal. Because of this, the barracks at all times provided a safe regency for the sadist and almost all of them earned rank. My sin was harder to figure. I did not participate at all in the rituals of the plebe system. Cruelty was easier to forgive than apostasy."
"Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law."
"I developed The Great Teacher theory late in my freshman year. It was a cornerstone of the theory that 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 climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft; knowing what to steal and from whom."