Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.
PAT CONROYMama 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.
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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A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.
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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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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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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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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
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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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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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I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
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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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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.
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One does not know where love will take you.
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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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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
PAT CONROY