Pat Conroy

...I lived for those long casual walks down the beach and the sight of her small footprints in the glistening wet sand...

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

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.

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

I was born in the age of "alas".

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

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

I do not think I was a hothead__ot then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress .

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.

We had made the error of staying small _ and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

I__e written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means__ome kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they__e been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.