There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
PAT CONROYYou touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.
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Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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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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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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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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Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
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Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
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I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
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Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
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Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.
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But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
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But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
PAT CONROY