A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
PAT CONROYI’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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.
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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
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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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One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
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The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn’t know how to ask.
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Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.
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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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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
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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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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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William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book,
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One does not know where love will take you.
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Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.
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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.
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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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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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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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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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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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Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.
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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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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.
PAT CONROY