Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
PAT CONROYBooks are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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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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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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Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.
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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
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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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Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
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Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
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Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.
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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?
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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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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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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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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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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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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies.
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Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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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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It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.
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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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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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I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
PAT CONROY