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I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

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
Knowledge
Stills
Pitied
Still
Tides
Real
Lived
Would
Terrible
Men
Already
Life
Waiting
Start

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Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.
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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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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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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.
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Writing has never been that simple for me.
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Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
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Families without songs are unhappy families.
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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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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
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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 was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.
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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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A story untold could be the one that kills you.
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Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
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I don't believe in happy families.
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.
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My mother raised me to be a writer.
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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.
Pat Conroy