Good writing … 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.
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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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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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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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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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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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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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.
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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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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My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.
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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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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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William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book,
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Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary
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We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
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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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The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…
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One does not know where love will take you.
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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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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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