The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
PAT CONROYMy mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
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Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.
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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
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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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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.
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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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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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It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.
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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
PAT CONROY