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.
PAT CONROYCarolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.
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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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Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
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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 story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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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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Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.
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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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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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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
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Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
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Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
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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.
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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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Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
PAT CONROY