Pat Conroy Quotes

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

Love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

I think human beings are funny, tricky things.

I'm a walking contradiction.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.

It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

Human beings are strange creatures. As people come across one another they produce various outcomes. Good things, sometimes. And other times, bad.

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.

We live in a bewildering world.

It's a funny old world.

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

I'm a full-of-contradictions kind of guy.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

If I were God, I would just be up there scratching my head, thinking, 'What the hell am I supposed to do with this?' For everyone helping an old lady across the street, there's someone else bludgeoning a person to death. And sometimes they're the same. How can He separate us all out?

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.