Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.
PAT CONROYI don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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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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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
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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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The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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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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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 CONROY






