I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
PAT CONROYMy mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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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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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.
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It 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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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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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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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
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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.
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I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
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Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.
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Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
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The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
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Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
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The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
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Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
PAT CONROY