We die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet.
PAT CONROYOnce 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
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When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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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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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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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
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I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me,
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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.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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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.
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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
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If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
PAT CONROY