The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
PAT CONROYI 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
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I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
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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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I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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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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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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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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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
PAT CONROY