Beach Music Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“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 its system of laws.”
― 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

“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

“Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“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

“Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“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

“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

“Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.”
― 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

“Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

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

“Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“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.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“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.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“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

“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

“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