She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
PAT CONROYYou can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary
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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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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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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.
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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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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
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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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My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
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The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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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.
PAT CONROY






