Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
-
Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
PAT CONROY -
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.
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.
PAT CONROY -
Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.
PAT CONROY -
-
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.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
PAT CONROY -
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
PAT CONROY -
We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
PAT CONROY -
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.
PAT CONROY -
Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
PAT CONROY -
And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
PAT CONROY -
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
PAT CONROY