Pat Conroy Quotes

There are certain songs I cannot hear because they are so personal that it hurts me to listen.

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.

There’s no reason for you to know all that about me. My memories have never served good to anyone. (Acheron)

Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

Too much to take in, too much to purge. Why must every memory, once sweet, dead end in such ugliness?

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

The worst moment of one's life could be seared into the memory, brighter than any joy.

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.

Memory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon on puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go.. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.

I start crying when certain things come up, certain memories, certain feelings, and it's intense. But I think it's good for me - and therapeutic.

As I handed her the bag, the old scars on my wrist throbbed with buried memories.

Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place

I bear a little more than I can bear.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

Memory is not what the heart desires.

Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

But she knew that no matter what beauty lay behind, it must remain there. No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.

I will not insult you by trying to tell you that one day you will forget. I know as well as you that you will not. But, at least, in time you will not remember as fiercely as you do now - and I pray that that time may be soon.

Memories have to be our most painful blessing.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.