Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
PAT CONROYI do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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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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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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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.
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I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
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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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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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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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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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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
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Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
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Good writing … 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.
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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.
PAT CONROY






