A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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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Good 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.
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The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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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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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
PAT CONROY -
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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I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
PAT CONROY -
I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.
PAT CONROY -
Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary
PAT CONROY -
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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My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
PAT CONROY






