There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
PAT CONROYI loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
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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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Faulkner 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
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
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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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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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One does not know where love will take you.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
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I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
PAT CONROY