Pat Conroy Quotes

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

There's always this thing of wanting to be elsewhere.

I have to feel that I'm going somewhere all the time. By definition, if you have this urge to go places, then you can't be 100 percent happy where you are. It's not like I enjoy being miserable for weeks on end. But I think it's good to be miserable for about one day every third week - that's ideal for me.

Travel is impossible, but daydreaming about travel is easy.

Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.' Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.

You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds and thinking maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay. Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world... and I like it.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

I really wish we could stay longer in the countries we visit, but I've been lucky to have visited most of them before, because I've done a tremendous amount of travel.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

I used to dream of being other places, other people. It was an escape for me.

Nostalgia often leads to idle speculation.

Your people do not seem to like the place where they live and always want to be on the move going someplace else.

I feel like I was born in the wrong time.

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get away from it.

There are times when you wish you were somewhere else, and someone else.

In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I'd close my eyes, and streets would materialize, rows of houses take shape. I could hear people's voices, feel the gentle, steady rhythm of their lives, those people so distant, whom I'd probably never know.

None are happy but by anticipation of change.

Provence is a country to which I am always returning, next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on a train.

The malcontent is neither well, full nor fasting; and though he abounds with complaints, yet nothing dislikes him but the present; for what he condemns while it was, once passed, he magnifies and strives to recall it out of the jaw of time. What he hath he seeth not, his eyes are so taken up with what he wants; and what he sees he careth not for, because be cares so much for that which is not.