Pat Conroy Quotes

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

I don't like being 50 and I don't like thinking about death.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy five and yet not ever truly to have lived.

We'll grow old waiting.

I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little.

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.

The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life,--chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.

Death is not the problem; waiting around for it is.

When your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near.

I left him in his wheelchair, staring sadly into the fireplace. I wondered how many times he’d sat here, waiting for heroes that never came back.

I’m not young anymore. I don’t wanna start over again.

I was very frightened when I turned forty. I suddenly thought I ought to wake up and be speaking with the voice of God.

Just sitting around waiting for my life to begin, while it was all just slipping away.

An unfulfilled life makes a hard man.

At eighty-two, I feel like a twenty-year-old, but, unfortunately, there's never one around.

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

If I just got up in the morning and had no place to go and was retired or something, I would be sitting there and be thinking, "Gee, what is the purpose of life? Why are we all finite? Why do we get old and die? Is there nothing out there? Why is it so tragic? Why do our loved ones perish? Why do we generate?" Who wants to think about that stuff?

Oh, to be seventy again!

I recently turned 60. Practically a third of my life is over.

That's the purpose of old age... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

It changed my whole outlook. I lost a decade to self-pity, and the next thing I knew I was turning 40.

We usually learn to wait only when we have no longer anything to wait for.