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 CONROYWe 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
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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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Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.
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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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Once 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.
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Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
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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.
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In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
PAT CONROY