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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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Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
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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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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 have to like that trend or go along with it.
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A story untold could be the one that kills you.
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My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.
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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, 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. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement.
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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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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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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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She 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.
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Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.
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... the wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.
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We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve got to be patient enough to wait for them.
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I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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I never read my reviews... not even the good ones. Barbra Streisand once told me, if just one person in the audience doesn't applaud, it bothers her. I'm the same way. I'd be devastated to read that someone didn't like my work.
Pat Conroy
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The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.
Pat Conroy
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When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
Pat Conroy