But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
PAT CONROYCarolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
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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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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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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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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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When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
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I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
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I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies.
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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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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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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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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
PAT CONROY