Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
PAT CONROYI’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.
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I 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.
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She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
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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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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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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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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 could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
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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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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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I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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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.
PAT CONROY