Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
PAT CONROYDo you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.
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Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
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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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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
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I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.
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One does not know where love will take you.
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
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You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.
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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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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.
PAT CONROY