The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.
PAT CONROYBut no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
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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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
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Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.
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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
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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’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.
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I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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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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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
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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.
PAT CONROY