Some of My Favorite Quotes from Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy, one of my favorite authors, passed away last Friday. I meant to say something then, but I didn't. He was truly a wonderful writer, and he expressed the ethos of the South, and the lowcountry of South Carolina in particular.

A few of my favorite quotes from his books:

“Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.”

“It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what ‘tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.”

“The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.”

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“In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.”