When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.
PAT CONROYWhen mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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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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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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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.
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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 writing is the hardest form of thinking. It 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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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
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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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The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
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Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
PAT CONROY