A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
PAT CONROYCarolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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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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She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
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One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
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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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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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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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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.
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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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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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I 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,
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Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen.
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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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It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.
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Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
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Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.
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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
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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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When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.
PAT CONROY