Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
PAT CONROYI 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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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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Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.
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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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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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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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I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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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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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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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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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.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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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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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.
PAT CONROY