“Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Beach Music
“I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from 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, quote from Beach Music
“Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from 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, quote from Beach Music
“I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Beach Music
“Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from 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, quote from Beach Music
“Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Words are pretty, but anyone can talk. Pay attention to the people who perform.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Beach Music
Pat Conroy
Born place: in Atlanta, Georgia, The United States
Born date October 26, 1945
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“I like my smock. You can tell the quality of the artist by the quality of his smock. Actually, I just like to say smock. Smock smock smock smock smock smock.”
― Bill Watterson, quote from The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
“I am a grown woman-- mostly-- and I can guzzle champagne with whomever I choose.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, quote from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
“As soon as the period of mourning for Dona Ester was over and the big house on the corner was finished, Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle were married in a modest ceremony. Esteban gave his wife a set of diamond jewelry, which she thought beautiful. She packed it away in a shoe box and quickly forgot where she had put it. They spent their honeymoon in Italy and two days after they were on the boat. Esteban was as madly in love as an adolescent, despite the fact that the movement of the ship made Clara uncontrollably ill and the tight quarters gave her asthma. Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compress to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy and desired her with unjust intensity considering the wretched state to which she was reduced. On the fourth day at sea, she woke up feeling better and they went out on deck to look at the sea. Seeing her with her wind-reddened nose, and laughing at the slightest provocation, Esteban swore that sooner or later she would come to love him as he needed to be loved, even if it meant he had to resort to extreme measures. He realized that Clara did not belong to him and that if she continued living in her world of apparitions, three-legged chairs that moved of their own volition, and cards that spelled out the future, she probably never would. Clara's impudent and nonchalant sensuality was also not enough for him. He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and that escaped him even in those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure. His hands felt very heavy, his feet very big, his voice very hard, his beard very scratchy, and his habits of rape and whoring very deeply ingrained, but even if he had to turn himself inside out like a glove, he was prepared to do everything in his power to seduce her.”
― Isabel Allende, quote from The House of the Spirits
“You were difficult enough to catch,” Faste said. Salander gave him a long look, satisfied herself that he was an idiot, and decided that she would not waste too many seconds concerning herself with his existence.”
― Stieg Larsson, quote from The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
“Hearts are fragile things. That's why you have to be so careful.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Delirium
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I Know Why the Caged...
I, Robot
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The Iron KingBookQuoters 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.
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