Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
PAT CONROYIt did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
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We die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet.
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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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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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
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Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.
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I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
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I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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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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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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I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.
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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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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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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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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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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.
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Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
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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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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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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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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY