A Quote by Pat Conroy

I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course. — © Pat Conroy
I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course.
We're all screwed up. And the way Christians mess things up is we act like we've got it going on. And if we would just stay in that place of, 'Hey, we're all screwed up and but for the grace of God, none of us have a shot here.' We need to have a sense of humor about it; that's kind of the way I've always faced my comedy.
People are screwed up in this world. I'd rather be with someone screwed up and open about it than somebody perfect and ready to explode.
People say 'Poor guy.' That insults me. I despise sympathy. So I screwed up. I made some mistakes. 'Poor guy,' like I'm some victim. There's nothing poor about me.
What I am most proud of with the book On to the Next Dream is how I turned an intensely emotional experience into art. Anyone can run up to a rooftop, tear off their clothes, and scream about how screwed up the world is. But for the people down below, all they see is a person losing their mind. I wanted to make something that channeled that emotion in a way that elicited an empathetic response from the reader. So that after you read this book, you would want to run up to the rooftop and scream about how screwed up the world is.
And then I screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers.
Mistakes don't scare me or bother me. If I feel like I made the same mistake twice, then I feel like I've really screwed up. But if I make one mistake and learn from it, hey, to me in the game of life it's just as important to know what doesn't work as what does. So I think mistakes are a good thing.
I want to tell you about the God that actually showed up and healed my heart. Not the God I grew up, because the God I grew up was fundamentally, and I use the word advisedly, fundamentally untrustworthy -- schizophrenic, narcissistic, unreachable, unknowable, and my concept within which I grew up was that Jesus -- He likes me -- but He came to save me from God the Father -- who was the one who was angry and distant, and unreachable, unknowable. All of that had to come crashing down.
We grew up listening to music like that: we grew up on the snap music, grew up off the trap music, grew up on all the South sound.
One of the torturous things about my job is that, as time goes on, you get more and more clarity on all the things you've screwed up and all the mistakes you've made.
I grew up caring about people and I would say again, that's what made me who I am. I became a doctor for what I like to call "healthy reasons." Not because I'm fascinated by the human body or want to understand death, but I like people and I want to help them. That also became my problem, because I couldn't help everyone, I couldn't fix everyone.
The second book, which was probably more from a professional standpoint - when I read Junot Díaz's Drown, I was like, Oh my god, you can write these stories and people will actually read them beyond your own little community. This guy's book is blowing up and it seems like [he's writing about] the neighborhood that I grew up in. That was a big deal. I read that in graduate school, so that's when I was really taking writing seriously, but I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know you can actually be an author. It was a weird epiphany.
I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich.
I grew up in the unlikely place of Connecticut. The Eastern Woodlands. It was semi-rural where I grew up. I was fascinated by the Piqua and the Mohegan Indians of that area.
We all screw up. Everyone makes mistakes. That’s what she did. It was bad judgment, that’s all. You don’t cut off the people you love for mistakes like that.
The stuff that's made up about Jesus - that you have to go through Jesus to get to God and if you're lucky, after you die, if you've done everything right, the reward is you get to sit on the right hand side of God. All that is made up by men. People made it up.
When you screw up in the ring, it's so embarrassing. But the fans don't know you screwed up unless you act like you just made a mistake.
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