My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
PAT CONROYHere’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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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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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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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.
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.
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Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.
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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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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
PAT CONROY