Honor is the presence of God in man.
PAT CONROYA family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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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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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
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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…
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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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.
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Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
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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.
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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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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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My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
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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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I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
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The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
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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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William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book,
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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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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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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
PAT CONROY