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Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

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
Form
Rewarding
Better
Exile
Writing
Novelists
Burn
Ambition
Discipline
Necessary
Reading

More quotes by Pat Conroy

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I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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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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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've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
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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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My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.
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If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.
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I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.
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I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.
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There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous.
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Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.
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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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I don't believe in happy families.
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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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