A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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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Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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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.
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Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.
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One does not know where love will take you.
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
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My 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.
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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 stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.
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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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Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
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But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
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Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…
PAT CONROY