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.
PAT CONROYThe most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
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In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
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Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
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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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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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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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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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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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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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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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From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
PAT CONROY