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.
PAT CONROYWhy do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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.
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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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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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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 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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But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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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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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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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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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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Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
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It’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 CONROY