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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
Family
Born
Gifts
Unhappy
Writer
Greatest

More quotes by Pat Conroy

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Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
Pat Conroy
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Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.
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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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.
Pat Conroy
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I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
Pat Conroy
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Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
Pat Conroy
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
Pat Conroy
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There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
Pat Conroy
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We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.
Pat Conroy
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We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.
Pat Conroy
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Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
Pat Conroy
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Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.
Pat Conroy
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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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My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
Pat Conroy
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I don't believe in happy families.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy