Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
PAT CONROYA recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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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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Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
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Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.
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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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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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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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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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Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
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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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I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies.
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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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Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.
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The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’
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From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
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You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.
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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 most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
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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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When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
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There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
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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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My 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.
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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