Pat Conroy

“The water is wide, I can't cross o'er. And neither have I wings to fly.”

“A library is a hospital for the mind.”

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”

“The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'”

“Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”

“Without music, life is a journey through a desert.”

“There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences.”

“Each of us is the sum of our own experiences.”

“My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, 'All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'”

“You don't have to be a Southerner to be a good writer, but it helps.”

“The heart's a dangerous fortress, you know. You build it up, you think you're safe, then someone, a stranger, comes along and finds the secret entrance.”

“That's the paradox of the south: grace and violence, hospitality and cruelty, living side-by-side, unseen, until they erupt.”

“Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived.”

“A story should be a verb, not a noun.”

“I do not have a gentle heart. I have a furious heart.”

“Losing is a skill like any other. To lose with grace is the mark of men and women of substance.”