Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROYIf the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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…
PAT CONROY -
One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
PAT CONROY -
If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
PAT CONROY -
I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.
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I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
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Cameras 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.
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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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Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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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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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
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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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Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.
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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
PAT CONROY -
Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.
PAT CONROY -
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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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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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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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.
PAT CONROY -
The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
PAT CONROY