She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
PAT CONROYWhy 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?
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.
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When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
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I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
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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’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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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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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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Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
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I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.
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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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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 could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
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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.
PAT CONROY






