“Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“ . . . I have come to revere words like "democracy" and "freedom," the right to vote, the incomprehensibly beautiful origins of my country, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I not see America's flaws? Of course I do. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. . . . I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones, but lacked the courage to act on: America is a good enough country to die for even when she is wrong.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“The words “I love you” could contain all the bloodthirsty despair of the abattoir, all the hopelessness of the most isolated, frozen gulag, all the lurid sadness of death row.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“I mourn for the quicksilvery racehorse passage of time. Its swiftness has caught me with the same ineffable start that comes to every man and woman who lives long enough. It remains as the single great surprise of any life. In”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, "the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Before I met the Jesuits, I’d never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Losing tears along the seam of your own image of yourself. It is a mark of shame that causes internal injury, but no visible damage.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“As we took the court for the second half, I made a secret now to myself that I would never listen to a single thing that Mel Thompson said to me again. I would obey him and honor him and follow him, but I would not let him touch the core of me again. He was my coach, but I was my master. ”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“I never once approached greatness, but toward the end of my career, I was always in the game.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“I WOULD NOT HAVE RETURNED TO this year of 1966 if I had not experienced one of those life-changing encounters on the road that rise up periodically to let us know that fate remains inexorable in its utter strangeness and its capacity for astonishment. At”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
Pat Conroy
Born place: in Atlanta, Georgia, The United States
Born date October 26, 1945
See more on GoodReads
“The girl arrived; I thought her handsome; and as I doubted not that you would be mortified by my absence, I did most sincerely hope that she would be able to dissipate something of your ennui: for it is the fidelity of the heart alone that I value.”
― Antoine François Prévost, quote from Manon Lescaut
“In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion. Irish Mary, Eva's sister, would have been happy enough to accept my father's ring, I suppose, had Eva not chosen to stay in Ireland and marry Tom. My mother's first fiancé would have married her gladly if he hadn't been kept too long overseas by the Navy, if my father hadn't beaten him home, on points, a full year before. It might have been Cody or John in the car with your father, that day on Long Island. I might have been gone. Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar's courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more.”
― Alice McDermott, quote from Charming Billy
“Why in the world would someone say, 'I can't afford it' or 'I can't do it' to something they want? Why would someone deny themselves the things they want? It makes no logical sense.”
― Robert T. Kiyosaki, quote from Rich Dad's Retire Young, Retire Rich: How to Get Rich Quickly and Stay Rich Forever!
“Volqué el arca en la bolsa, la despensa en la alforja y el lastre de los malos pensamientos en el fondo del pozo y, aprovechándome de la noche como un ladrón, cogí el portante, enfilé la carretera y comencé a caminar —sin saber demasiado a dónde ir— campo adelante y tan seguido que, cuando amaneció y el cansancio que notaba en los huesos ya era mucho, quedaba el pueblo, cuando menos, tres leguas a mis espaldas.”
― Camilo José Cela, quote from The Family of Pascual Duarte
“You would think there's a natural limit to tears: only so much the body can give at one sitting before it runs dry.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing
Fall From Grace
Death on the Install...
Wild Seed
Silence
The Year of Living B...
AirbornBookQuoters 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.
