Quote

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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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
Never
Works
Hold
Racehorse
Walks
Racehorses
Secret
Tortoises
Waiting
Secrets
Art
Lady
Come
Patient
Enough
Wait

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... the wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.
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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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I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
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My mother raised me to be a writer.
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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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Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.
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When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.
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Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.
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Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.
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Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
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I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one.
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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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Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.
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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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It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me.
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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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Carolina beach music, Dupree said, coming up on the porch. The holiest sound on earth.
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Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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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.
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