William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book,
PAT CONROYThere 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
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You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.
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The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn’t know how to ask.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
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The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It’s a crowning achievement of his own storied career.
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Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.
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In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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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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She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
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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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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.
PAT CONROY