Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.
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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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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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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I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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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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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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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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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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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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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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There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
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Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
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If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
PAT CONROY