Rita > Rita's Quotes

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.”
― Pat Conroy

“Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“A story untold could be the one that kills you.”
― Pat Conroy

“Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.”
― Pat Conroy

“No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“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.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Love is a better master than duty.”
― Albert Einstein

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”
― George Bernard Shaw, BBC Radio presents Man and superman

“I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted
most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.”
― Nora Ephron

“Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.”
― Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

“Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables