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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
Reading
Form
Rewarding
Better
Exile
Writing
Novelists
Burn
Ambition
Discipline
Necessary

More quotes by Pat Conroy

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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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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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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.
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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.
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I don't believe in happy families.
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I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one.
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He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.
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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.
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Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
Pat Conroy
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Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.
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Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
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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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She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
Pat Conroy
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My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.
Pat Conroy
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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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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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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
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The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask.
Pat Conroy
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Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy