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.
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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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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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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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
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There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
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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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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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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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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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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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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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Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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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?
PAT CONROY