Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROYBaseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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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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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.
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Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.
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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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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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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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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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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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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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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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Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
PAT CONROY