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.
PAT CONROYCameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
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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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.
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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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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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The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
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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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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
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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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She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
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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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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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Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
PAT CONROY






