Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
PAT CONROYPut me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.
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I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
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Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
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Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.
PAT CONROY -
I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.
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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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One does not know where love will take you.
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When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.
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Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn’t know how to ask.
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There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
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Good writing … involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
PAT CONROY






