The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
PAT CONROYFaulkner 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
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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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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We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
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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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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.
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Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
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Good writing … 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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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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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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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 have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies.
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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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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.
PAT CONROY






