Because I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.

— Pat Conroy

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.

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

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

— Pat Conroy

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

— Pat Conroy

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Collet on in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Collet on ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.

— Pat Conroy

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.

— Pat Conroy

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

— Pat Conroy

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

— Pat Conroy

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

— Pat Conroy