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 CONROYWalking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.
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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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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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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
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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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But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
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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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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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We die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet.
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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
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Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
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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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Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
PAT CONROY