There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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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You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.
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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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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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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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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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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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Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
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Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
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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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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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One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
PAT CONROY