One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
PAT CONROYCameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
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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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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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Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
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My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
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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 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 could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
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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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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen.
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I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
PAT CONROY