I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
PAT CONROYWhen mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.
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William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book,
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Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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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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Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.
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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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Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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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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No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.
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Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
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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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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
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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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I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.
PAT CONROY






