The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It’s a crowning achievement of his own storied career.
PAT CONROYGood 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.
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I 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.
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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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Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.
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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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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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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 could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
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Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
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I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
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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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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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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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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
PAT CONROY