My Exaggerated Life Quotes

“Again, suicide seemed great to me. There was no fear involved with it. It just seemed like the best thing I could do for everybody. It would solve everybody’s problems. My not being around would solve everything. And it would especially solve it for me. I remember when I took all these drugs, I felt happy doing it, like I wouldn’t have to feel this thing in my stomach, I wouldn’t have to be bent over with anxiety and sleeplessness. So I took the pills and woke up two days later. I think that’s the time I threw up. I believe that’s what saved me that time. When I look back, I think I kind of semiplanned it, keeping drugs around, hoping I had enough to do the job, feeling very rational when I was doing that.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“My body was telling me to rest the old machine for a while. Every afternoon about six o’clock I watched The Waltons, to try to heal myself just to get back what human kindness looked like. It was tonic for my soul. That seems so hokey, but that’s what I needed right then—hokeyness—some blessed way of living. I was still writing the book somehow, I was drinking too much, and I would await these phone calls from Lenore with dread, just absolute dread.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“Much of what we do in life is repair work on our childhood. We try to make it better than it was when we were growing up. But usually our insecurities remain our insecurities.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“I’ve always thought that the supreme relationship is the one between mother and child, and the bond of mothers and sons can be devastatingly intimate like no other relationship on earth.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“Alan was a loathsome, spiderous, cancerous, scorpious son of a bitch. There are some people—I hate living in the world they live in. They draw air that could be used by a dying cockroach.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“But when The Prince of Tides came out, thank God she was dead. I’m not sure I would have had the guts to publish that with her still alive.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“The two most dangerous words in the English language are ‘like’ and ‘as.’ If you do not have something interesting to say after you write down those two words, cross them out, because you’ve entered into the country of cliché. Make sure you have something to say that is new or fresh or in a different way; otherwise, leave them alone.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“With poetry, you take the stock and boil it down to where it’s a glaze. It is the elixir of language.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“My theory of the universe is if God sees you enjoying yourself, he will fuck up the next week of your life completely.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“They were simply the moanings of sperm cells locked away too long in scrotums.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“being a reader. When I enter into a world that is not mine, I find such happiness, such completion, such totality. I love it when a book does that for me. The happiness that reading gives me has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life. I read with joy, I take great pleasure in it, and I think it has saved my life. I have to get a certain amount of reading in each day; I’ve got to have those words coming at me. God, I love what it does. When I’m into a book that I love, it is a form of perfect happiness on earth for me. I don’t need any more.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“My father confused me about what it meant to become a man. From an early age, I knew I didn’t want to be anything like the man he was. PAT CONROY, My Reading Life”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“When you’ve got a father who beats you, as a kid you think it’s your fault. You develop a self-destructive belief that you’re no good. The conflict Pat’s always had is whether he’s worth anything or worth nothing. MARION O’NEILL, Ph.D., ABPP, clinical psychologist”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“dear katherine,I,pat conroy,being of sound mind and fat body,do ssolemnly swear that I haveneither heard of nor ever spoken to the disreputable woman named katherine clark.these assertions will become clearer when I file my defamation suit against her.I will prove in an open court of law that none of the statements in her scurrilous texts were ever spoken,thought or expressed by me.you will soon be hearing from my bloodthirsty lawyers who will go after possession of your bayside mansion and your ten thousand dollar dog.congratulations,katherine.you worked your ass off and all I did was run my mouth.great love,pat conroy”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“Behind all that thunder, you’re just pure honey,” is as true a statement about Pat Conroy as it is of Jack McCall in Beach Music.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” Although Pat scoffed at the idea that he possessed a merry heart, this is precisely what his multitude of friends has come to know and love about him. When someone asked his wife, Cassandra King, what it was like to live with such a tortured soul, she replied that Pat was one of the most good-natured people she’d ever known. His psychologist Marion O’Neill told me that Pat possessed “an underlying positive-ness about life,” and she went on to say, “That’s what has kept him alive.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“Conroy himself suffered cruelties and injustices throughout his life, from the time he was a child beaten by a violent and abusive father. The man who emerged from the crucible of chronic trauma was a warrior of words, determined to bear witness to the wrongs inflicted on the innocent and vulnerable by the corrupt and powerful.”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“My mother sits on my shoulder, and my mother: ‘Be nice to everyone, son. Make sure you talk to everyone. Ask them a personal question, son. At least pretend like you’re sincere.’ And her final thing: ‘Whoever you meet, make sure they leave your presence happy”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy

“Why do they not teach you that time is a fingersnap and an eyeblink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit? PAT CONROY, My Losing Season”
― Katherine Clark, My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy