In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
PAT CONROYFew 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It’s a crowning achievement of his own storied career.
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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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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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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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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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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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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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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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My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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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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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
PAT CONROY