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.
PAT CONROYOnce 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.
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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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
PAT CONROY -
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
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You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.
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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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Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
PAT CONROY -
A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
PAT CONROY -
Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
PAT CONROY -
American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
PAT CONROY