I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
PAT CONROYDo 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.
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Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
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Why 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?
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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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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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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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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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I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.
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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
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One does not know where love will take you.
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I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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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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My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
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I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
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Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.
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I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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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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Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.
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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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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