One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
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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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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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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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 you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
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I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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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
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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
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Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
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Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen.
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Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
PAT CONROY