Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
PAT CONROYThe English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
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I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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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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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It 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.
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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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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.
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Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
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Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.
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From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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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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I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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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