Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
PAT CONROYEvery 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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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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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
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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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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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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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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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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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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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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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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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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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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
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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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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
PAT CONROY