"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."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert."
— Pat Conroy

"Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"A story untold could be the one that kills you."
— Pat Conroy

"I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey."
— Pat Conroy

"Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk."
— Pat Conroy

"Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"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."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"But ever her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into it's system of laws."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
- - - Pat Conroy
"
— Pat Conroy

"Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"Man wonders but God decides when to kill the Prince of Tides."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"I taught Leah how to tell where we were in the Campo by using her sense of smell. The south side was glazed with the smell of slain fish and no amount of water or broom-work could ever eliminate the tincture of ammonia scenting that part of the piazza. The fish had written their names in those stones. But so had the young lambs and the coffee beans and torn arugula and the glistening tiers of citrus and the bread baking that produced a golden brown perfume from the great ovens. I whispered to Leah that a sense of smell was better than a yearbook for imprinting the delicate graffiti of time in the memory."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"I had come to Charleston as a young boy, a lonely visitor slouching through its well-tended streets, a young boy, lean and grassy, who grew fluent in his devotion and appreciation of that city's inestimable charm. I was a boy there and saw things through the eyes of a boy for the last time. The boy was dying and I wanted to leave him in the silent lanes South of Broad.I would leave him with no regrets except that I had not stopped to honor his passing. I had not thanked the boy for his capacity for astonishment, for curiosity, and for survival. I was indebted to that boy. I owed him my respect and my thanks. I owed him my remembrance of the lessons he learned so keenly and so ominously."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Memory in these incomparable streets, in mosaics of pain and sweetness, was clear to me now, a unity at last. I remembered small and unimportant things from the past: the whispers of roommates during thunderstorms, the smell of brass polish on my fingertips, the first swim at Folly Beach in April, lightning over the Atlantic, shelling oysters at Bowen's Island during a rare Carolina snowstorm, pigeons strutting across the graveyard at St. Philip's, lawyers moving out of their offices to lunch on Broad Street, the darkness of reveille on cold winter mornings, regattas, the flash of bagpipers' tartans passing in review, blue herons on the marshes, the pressure of the chinstrap on my shako, brotherhood, shad roe at Henry's, camellias floating above water in a porcelain bowl, the scowl of Mark Santoro, and brotherhood again."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"I went up to the terrace again and looked out on the tawny, many-alleyed city. At night it looked carved from brown sugar."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"…Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak—and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"I will take you down my own avenue of remembrance, which winds among the hazards and shadows of my single year as a plebe. I cannot come to this story in full voice. I want to speak for the boys who were violated by this school, the ones who left ashamed and broken and dishonored, who departed from the Institute with wounds and bitter grievances. I want also to speak for the triumphant boys who took everything the system could throw at them, endured every torment and excess, and survived the ordeal of the freshman year with a feeling of transformation and achievement that they never had felt before and would never know again with such clarity and elation.

I will speak from my memory- my memory- a memory that is all refracting light slanting through prisms and dreams, a shifting, troubled riot of electrons charged with pain and wonder. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essentional fire that is poetry itself.

But i will try to isolate that one lonely singer who gathered the fragments of my plebe year and set the screams to music. For many years, I have refused to listen as his obsessive voice narrated the malignant litany of crimes against my boyhood. We isolate those poets who cause us the greatest pain; we silence them in any way we can. I have never allowed this furious dissident the courtesy of my full attention. His poems are songs for the dead to me. Something dies in me every time I hear his low, courageous voice calling to me from the solitude of his exile. He has always known that someday I would have to listen to his story, that I would have to deal with the truth or falsity of his witness. He has always known that someday I must take full responsibility for his creation and that, in finally listening to him, I would be sounding the darkest fathoms of myself. I will write his stories now as he shouts them to me. I will listen to him and listen to myself. I will get it all down.

Yet the laws of recall are subject to distortion and alienation. Memory is a trick, and I have lied so often to myself about my own role and the role of others that I am not sure I can recognize the truth about those days. But I have come to believe in the unconscious integrity of lies. I want to record even them. Somewhere in the immensity of the lie the truth gleams like the pure, light-glazed bones of an extinct angel. Hidden in the enormous falsity of my story is the truth for all of us who began at the Institute in 1963, and for all who survived to become her sons. I write my own truth, in my own time, in my own way, and take full responsibility for its mistakes and slanders. Even the lies are part of my truth.

I return to the city of memory, to the city of exiled poets. I approach the one whose back is turned to me. He is frail and timorous and angry. His head is shaved and he fears the judgment of regiments. He will always be a victim, always a plebe. I tap him on the shoulder.
"Begin," I command.
"It was the beginning of 1963," he begins, and I know he will not stop until the story has ended."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"At the top the bridge with the stars shining above the harbor, I look to the north and wish again that there were two lives apportioned to every man and woman."
— Pat Conroy

"My wound is geography. It is also my achorage, my port of call"
— Pat Conroy

"I had the need to be the good master, but definitely the master, no matter what the cost."
— Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)

"Man wonders but God decides
Who kills the Prince of Tides"
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"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."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest."
— Pat Conroy (Lords of Discipline-V1)

"Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey.

"
— Pat Conroy

""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.""
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

""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."
"
— Pat Conroy

""She was one of those Southerners who were aware 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.""
— Pat Conroy