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.
PAT CONROYLove’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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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.
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One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.
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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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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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Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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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.
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I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
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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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There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
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Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
PAT CONROY