Pat Conroy Quotes

As authentic as it is riveting and ultimately unforgettable. Your past will find you-and it can change your life. I think it's the most soulful book Patti Callahan has ever written.

Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.

After I finished high school I went to Hong Kong and Thailand and spent some time there. Just to get that whole experience of being out of the bubble that I was in from high school in Vancouver, to be able to travel around and be on your own was an amazing experience.

My first time to Rome was when I was backpacking with my best friend around Europe for a month at 18 years old, so I remember that excitement of being away from home properly for the first time.

And then a great thing in my life was going to India.

'Gunday' might not be the best film of my life, but it's been a life-altering film for me.

I arrived in Bangkok in 1980: I was 23 years old, and it changed my life.

I never felt I was missing anything ever until one day I stopped long enough to smell the roses outside of this little treadmill I'd gotten myself onto and I realised there were other things that I like that I didn't know. I realised I didn't like certain things in my life that I then got rid of and it just opened the door to a plethora of other things that entered.

I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkness.

When I was young, my mother [folk singer Kate McGarrigle] brought home this recording of Verdi's Requiem and we listened to it from top to bottom. By the end of it, I was a completely different person. It was literally a requiem mass for my former self. I was about 12 or 13. The Requiem just totally hooked into what I was going through emotionally - discovering my sexuality right at the time when AIDS was devastating my community and dealing with intense parental situations.

The reason I love travel is not just because it transports you in every sense, but because it confronts you with emotional and moral challenges that you would never have to confront at home. So I like going out in search of moral and emotional adventure which throws me back upon myself and forces me to reconsider my assumptions and the things I took for granted. It sends me back a different person.

I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful.

I think the last few weeks for me have been just a very different emotional experience. Something I never thought I would feel myself. And I find...a lot of things affect me differently now. As any new parent knows, you're only too happy to show off your new child and, you know, proclaim that he is the best looking or the best everything.

You changed my life. You changed my ways. I don't even recognize myself these days. It must be a reflection of you, only you.

In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: ‘Incipit vita nova: Here begins the new life’.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

Really, the greatest compliments about a book [One Thousand Gifts] are never about the book, or the author of the book, but about the reader and God and how the pages helped them connect at a deeper level.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.

Books showed me that there were other ways to live a life.

I never imagined I'd write a book.

One is seldom unchanged by the death of those one loves. It gives me a deeper knowledge of them, and so of oneself in regard to them.

I spent a year pulling all-nighters and driving around in a really tiny fuel-efficient car relying on the kindness of strangers and seeing this incredible range of landscapes throughout the United States. That's what happened with The Honesty Room. It was a huge night and day switch.

I think it was simply word of mouth that made it a New York Times bestseller for more than 60 weeks, over a year. People being moved and changed and transformed by the book [ One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are] and wanting to share that with hurting people all around them.