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 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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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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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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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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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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The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.
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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.
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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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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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I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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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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I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
PAT CONROY