I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
PAT CONROYMy attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
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We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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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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You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.
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I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
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Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
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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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Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
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There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
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Good writing … involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
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The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
PAT CONROY