I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
PAT CONROYI have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
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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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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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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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There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
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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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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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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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Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
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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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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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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