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 CONROYThe most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It’s a crowning achievement of his own storied career.
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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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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
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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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I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
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Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
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Good writing … 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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One does not know where love will take you.
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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’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
PAT CONROY