Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
PAT CONROYIt’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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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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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I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.
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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.
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From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
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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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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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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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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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I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
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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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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
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Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.
PAT CONROY






