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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
Better
Exile
Writing
Novelists
Burn
Ambition
Discipline
Necessary
Reading
Form
Rewarding

More quotes by 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.
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Carolina beach music, Dupree said, coming up on the porch. The holiest sound on earth.
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Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
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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.
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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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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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I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.
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The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
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I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.
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Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.
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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.
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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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?
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I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Writing has never been that simple for me.
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