Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.
PAT CONROYAnyone 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.
More Pat Conroy Quotes
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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.
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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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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
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I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
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You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.
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I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of 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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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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The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
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South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.
PAT CONROY