Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
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 loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
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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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My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
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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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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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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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When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
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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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It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.
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She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
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Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
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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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Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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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.
PAT CONROY