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.
PAT CONROYThe great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn’t know how to ask.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
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Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
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We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
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Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.
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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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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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No 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.
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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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Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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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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Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
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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.
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Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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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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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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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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Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.
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I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
PAT CONROY