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 CONROYShe 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.
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The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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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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And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
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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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The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
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Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.
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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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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.
PAT CONROY