Pat Conroy Quotes

I had a very angry father and was disconnected from my family.

I built up so much hatred for my parents, like so much anger for the life they had given me.

For most of my life, I believed that my father had broken many of my bones. They were emotional and psychological bones; things no one could see, things that caused me to limp through life clutching for and holding on to people and situations that often rendered me immobile.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

I have daddy issues. So I keep tissues on me at all times.

The real demon in my life is my father.

Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.

My stepfather was fond of letting me know, quote, 'I ain't your... damn daddy.' That was something that was painful, to put it mildly.

I probably gave up on my dad when I was born.

I forgive my mom for being a psycho and my dad for being a loser.

My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood.

The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight.

My father was overbearing. Very controlling. He was always the way he is, even before my success. He was not always a good person. He'd play mind games to make sure I knew my place. I don't see him, which is unfortunate. But I don't have any desire to see him. I vaguely know where he is, and I don't want to know.

What must it be like for a little boy to read that daddy never loved mummy?

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

I used to tell my mum to leave my dad when I was, like, nine. I loved my father, don't get me wrong. I really loved him, but he wasn't a good dad, and he wasn't a good husband.

I always have to brace myself when I visit my parents. My mom often greets me with a slew of nonconstructive criticisms: 'Jimmy, why is your face so fat? Your clothes look homeless and your long hair makes you look like a girl.' After 30 years of this, my self-image is now a fat homeless lesbian.

I can understand a family that's imploding. I have experience of that in my own life.

I have sister issues and parent issues and all sorts of things.

Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family.

My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

I can see how the young girls really get hurt when their moms are critical, or vice versa when they're overly critical of their moms. It can be so painful.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

My childhood was marked by a tension between privilege on the one hand and emotional dysfunction on the other.