My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
PAT CONROYBooks are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…
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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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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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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
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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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A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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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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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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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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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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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
PAT CONROY