Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
PAT CONROYI discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
PAT CONROY -
When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.
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.
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.
PAT CONROY -
Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
PAT CONROY -
Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
PAT CONROY -
In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
PAT CONROY -
Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…
PAT CONROY -
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY -
A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
PAT CONROY -
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.
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 -
Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
PAT CONROY