The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
PAT CONROY
Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
PAT CONROY -
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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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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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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.
PAT CONROY -
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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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
PAT CONROY -
There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
PAT CONROY -
Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
PAT CONROY -
I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me,
PAT CONROY -
A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
PAT CONROY -
Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
PAT CONROY -
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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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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I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
PAT CONROY -
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
PAT CONROY