Quotes from Beach Music

“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

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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.