The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
PAT CONROYWithout music, life is a journey through a desert.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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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.
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The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
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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 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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It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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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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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.
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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.
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One does not know where love will take you.
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It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.
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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.
PAT CONROY






