We die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet.
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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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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My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
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My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.
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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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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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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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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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I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
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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. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn’t know how to ask.
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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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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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One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
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I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
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I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies.
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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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The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.
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Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.
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Honor is the presence of God in man.
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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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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.
PAT CONROY