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One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

Pat Conroy

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Pat Conroy
Age: 70 †
Born: 1945
Born: October 26
Died: 2016
Died: March 4
Author
Basketball Player
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Patrick Conroy
Donald Patrick Conroy
Gifts
Unhappy
Writer
Greatest
Family
Born

More quotes by Pat Conroy

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In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some of the things your parents did to you. But with friends it's different. Friends aren't the roll of the dice.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
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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?
Pat Conroy
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
Pat Conroy
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
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I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
Pat Conroy
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When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.
Pat Conroy
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Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.
Pat Conroy
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It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.
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Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.
Pat Conroy
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Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.
Pat Conroy
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If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you.
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Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
Pat Conroy
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Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.
Pat Conroy
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... the wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.
Pat Conroy
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She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs.
Pat Conroy
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The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
Pat Conroy
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These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.
Pat Conroy
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Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
Pat Conroy