Quotes from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“I’ve 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—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“If any writer in this country has collected as fine and passionate a group of readers as I have, they’re fortunate and lucky beyond anyone’s imagination. It remains a shock to me that I’ve had a successful writing career. Not someone like me; Lord, there were too many forces working against me, too many dark currents pushing against me, but it somehow worked. Though I wish I’d written a lot more, been bolder with my talent, more forgiving of my weaknesses, I’ve managed to draw a magic audience into my circle. They come to my signings to tell me stories, their stories. The ones that have hurt them and made their nights long and their lives harder.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Few people understood the exceptional role the civil rights movement had on the white boys and girls of the South. Bill Clinton would never have become who he was without the shining example of Martin Luther King. The same is true of Jimmy Carter and Fritz Hollings and Richard and Joe Riley. Imagine this: you’re a little white kid and you watch firehoses turned on people who don’t seem to be hurting anyone, and fierce dogs being tuned on young men who carry signs about freedom. We white kids grew up watching movies and TV and guess what we had learned to do? We had learned to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Humor has always been the redemptive angel in the Conroys’s sad history. With this family, I shall never grow hungry from lack of material.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“The choices I didn’t make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“I envy the tireless intimacy of women’s friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that’s me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Throughout my career I’ve lived in constant fear that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I’d have nothing to say, that I’d be laughed at, humiliated—and I’m old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I’ll ever write. As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I’m supposed to write—the grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don’t quite know it. But I trust I’ll begin to know it soon.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“From the beginning, I’ve told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I’m the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“I was raised in the Marine Corps and I was taught as a boy that you feed your own men before you feed yourself. It was my belief then, and it remains so today, that my platoon who loves and respect me will slaughter your platoon that hates you. But here is the great lesson I took from the plebe system—it let me know exactly the kind of man I wanted to become. It made me ache to be a contributing citizen in whatever society I found myself in, to live out a life I could be proud of, and always to measure up to what I took to be the highest ideal of a Citadel man—or, now, a Citadel woman. The standards were clear to me and they were high, and I took my marching orders from my college to take my hard-won education and go out to try to make the whole world a better place.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“I was a watchful boy being raised by a father I didn’t admire. In a desperate way, I needed the guidance of someone who could show me another way of becoming a man. It was sometime during the year when I decided I would become the kind of man that Bill Dufford was born to be. I wanted to be the type of man that a whole town could respect and honor and fall in love with—the way Beaufort did when Bill Dufford came to town to teach and shape and turn its children into the best citizens they could be.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she’s tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“I do not think I was a hothead—not 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.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“It’s the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“And I have begun thinking of that life as miraculous and lucky. How could a man I had dreaded as my commandant and who tried twice to get me kicked out of college become the subject of the first book I would write? [...] Who could have foreseen the day I would deliver his eulogy at the Summerall Chapel, or that I would give a speech on the night they named the dining room in the new Alumni Hall after him? Not me. Not once. Not ever.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Once The Boo roamed this campus fierce, alert, and lion-voiced, and his wrath was a terrible thing. He could scream and rant and call us “bums” a thousand times, but he could not hide his clear and overwhelming love of the Corps. The Corps received that love, took it in, felt it in the deepest places, and now, tonight, we give it back at the school where we started out and we give it to The Boo, as a gift, because once, many years ago, The Boo loved us first, when we were cadets of boys and when we needed it the most.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts—the ability and willingness to change his mind and do it in an orderly, well-reasoned way.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Throughout my career I’ve lived in constant fear that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I’d have nothing to say, that I’d be laughed at, humiliated—and I’m old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I’ll ever write. As”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

“Though I’ve never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones, those who must teach in public schools when the whole nation seems at war with the very essence of teaching.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

About the author

Popular quotes

“We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Uljas uusi maailma

“Knuckleballers don't keep secrets. It's as if we have a greater mission beyond our own fortunes. And that mission is to pass it on, to keep the pitch alive. Maybe that's because we are so different, and the pitch is do different, but I think it has more to do with the fact that this is a pitch that almost all of us turn to in desperation. It is what enables us to keep pitching stay in the big leagues, when everything else has failed. So we feel gratitude toward the pitch. It becomes way more than just a means to get and out.
It becomes a way of life.”
― quote from Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball

“Sometimes, coming home in the early morning like this, I'd imagine things had altered while I was absent: a knife on the bread board that I didn't remember leaving out, a book face down on the table, a cup brimming with tea and dishwater in the sink. The evidence I wanted didn't need to be too elaborate or detailed. I could have constructed an entire afterlife from a half-moon of lemon rind or a small blister of jam on the tablecloth.”
― John Burnside, quote from The Dumb House

“His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.
Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement.”
― Jane Gardam, quote from Old Filth

“Everyone stop moving!” he bellowed. “Especially you, chickens! CHICKENS, GIVE UP! WE’RE GOING TO EAT YOU! THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT! STOP RUNNING AWAY RIGHT NOW!” “SQUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWK”
― Tui T. Sutherland, quote from Moon Rising

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.