American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
PAT CONROYAmerican men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
PAT CONROYCharleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
PAT CONROYIf 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.
PAT CONROYWalking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
PAT CONROYThen, 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.
PAT CONROYEvil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
PAT CONROYIt’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.
PAT CONROYNo story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.
PAT CONROYI prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me,
PAT CONROYBut even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
PAT CONROYMy attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
PAT CONROYA story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
PAT CONROYMy soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
PAT CONROYMan wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
PAT CONROYThe 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.
PAT CONROYGood coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
PAT CONROY