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.
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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I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
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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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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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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
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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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Why 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?
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
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Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
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Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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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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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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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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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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Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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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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Every 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.
PAT CONROY