Pat Conroy Quotes

Like every Southern writer, I thought that I needed to write the next 'Gone With the Wind.'

Every Southern man sustains me. The fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relicts. .

Anything to do with the South resonates with me, because I'm Southern.

I feel like if you're a girl in the South, you know 'Gone with the Wind' better than anything. Scarlett O'Hara is such a quintessential Southern woman.

Southern Gothic is alive and well. It's not just a genre, it is a way of life.

Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity.

For breakfast I have grits, because I'm a Southern girl!

I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.

I have two favorite songs. My first is called 'Dance of The Robe' and it's a very powerful number where she is feeling the pressure from her people to take on the responsibility of leading them.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

There's something sort of intrinsic in being a Southerner that doesn't go away. You can't get rid of it, but it's not something that's terribly obvious.

Empires dissolve and peoples disappear, song passes not away.

The South is the only part of the country that has been defeated; the rest of the country, unlike most people in the world have never been conquered. But the Southerners have …. The South is the soul of America.

The thing about the South is we accept our history. We don't push it under the rug.

I don't want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it's a great place to come from. It's also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.

In the South, we drink the Bible with our mother's milk.

Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.

I like being Southern; I like going to Cracker Barrel - I mean, that's just how I am.

I'm Southern to the bone.

The South is a place for music, dance, and culture.

My daddy - whenever he wanted to teach us a lesson, he'd tell us a story. It's an Old South tradition.

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.

We go to Europe, and they think we're totally prejudiced 'cause we hang the bars and stripes. But for us, the bars and stripes doesn't mean we want to see anybody in slavery or anything like that. It's just our heritage. To us, the bars and stripes means grits, 'y'all,' and the beauty of the South. There's no prejudice at all in that with us.

I'd spent summers growing up in Mississippi, so I had an idea of what the South is like.

Southern man better keep your head, don't forget what your good book says.