But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
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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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
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One does not know where love will take you.
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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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I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me,
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You 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.
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Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
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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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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.
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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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Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.
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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.
PAT CONROY






