I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
PAT CONROYThe pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.
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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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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.
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But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
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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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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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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. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn’t know how to ask.
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But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
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In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
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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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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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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.
PAT CONROY