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.
PAT CONROYThere are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
PAT CONROY -
I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
PAT CONROY -
The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It’s a crowning achievement of his own storied career.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
PAT CONROY -
There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.
PAT CONROY -
Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…
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But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
PAT CONROY -
Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
PAT CONROY