Pat Conroy Quotes

So you were going to rescue the Prince! Why did you pretend to run away? To deceive the Witch?" "Not likely! I'm a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I'm not doing it!

People say nice things about me but they don't know what's been going on between my ears.

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

He that hath hornes in his bosom, let him not put them on his head.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

It is bad for the soul to know itself a coward, it is apt to take refuge in mere wordy violence.

That's the illusion - the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out - and it has affected us in many ways. That's a part of the idea that professing is enough.

Fools through false shame, conceal their open wounds.

You cannot be brave if you do not have a coward inside you.

I'd never allow myself to let myself call myself a coward.

We know how often in our lives through laziness and cowardice we give up the battle and try to hypnotise our minds into the belief that we are brave.

You know why you hate me so much, Jeffery? Because I look the way you feel.

I'm pretty confident and, at the same time, I'm pretty insecure. I'm like a walking conflict.

What I say and what I'm really experiencing - those universes are very different.

Seven times have I despised my soul: The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks.

By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.

I feel like a big faker because I've been putting my life back together, and nobody knows.

Knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway happens very often in life, and I doubt I will ever know why.

I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

I'm a total wreck. Afraid to let anyone near. Afraid they'll see the real me.

For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do--out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation--look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.

I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.