Pat Conroy Quotes

South Carolina is a great place to be from.

The New Orleans I knew ain't no more.

Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting.

Looking back at my high school years, I'm struck by how slowly history can move.

The world changed. Hollywood changed. I think we've lost something, and we don't know how to get it back.

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

Driving through much of the southern part of the U.S. reminds me of where I grew up in Canada. The trees, homes, sense of community... I love the South.

To be in the South in my first big job was very nostalgic. There is an energy to the way we do things in the South.

If I happen to have another baby or something like that, I'd probably move back to Louisiana. I do miss Louisiana. I miss the people. I miss the food. I miss the way of life, how everything is really simple. There's no traffic like there is in L.A. It's really nice.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

I think it's easy to hold on to this romantic hope that communities such as Niaqornat won't change, because we're in this world where progress is unstoppable, and they're a link to some idealised past.

I've been vacationing in western North Carolina and northern Georgia since I was a kid. I arrive, marvel at the mountains, and put on an unconvincing Southern drawl.

I'm from Raleigh, North Carolina, and I can't lie… I missed the South since I've been gone!

There's such a deep, conservative feeling in 'The way Back.' You go, 'gosh, we've gotten narrow.' So at the moment I think there's a kind of tension, and it's gold rush fever.

When I was growing up - say in the fifties - the thirties to me didn't even exist. I couldn't even imagine them in any kind of way, so I don't expect anyone growing up now is gonna even understand what the sixties were all about, anymore than I could the thirties or twenties.

She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi, and she always smelled faintly of cottonwood and peaches.

[The South] is ****ed for its virtues and praised for its faults, and there are those who wish its annihilation. But most revealing of all is the fear that it gestates the revolutionary impulse of our future.

You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

The beer and the wurst were wonderful, but I was dying to be back in the South, where the livin' was easy, where the fish were jumpin', where the cotton grew high.

The only place in the world that nothing has to be explained to me is the South.

I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

Maybe when we were shooting in the school, I was feeling more like it. Every time I go back to a school for work, I always feel so huge. Everything seems so little. The lockers seem smaller than I remember and the length of the hallways seem shorter when you're a kid.

I can’t believe how much this place has grown,” Hazel muttered. The taxi driver grinned in the rearview mirror. “Been a long time since you visited, miss?” “About seventy years,” Hazel said. The driver slid the glass partition closed and drove on in silence.

My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.

Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.