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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

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
Life
Explain
Writing
Way

More quotes by Pat Conroy

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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
Pat Conroy
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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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Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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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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We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, Oh, Mama, do it again! And I had my earliest memory.
Pat Conroy
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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
Pat Conroy
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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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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.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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... the wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.
Pat Conroy
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The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
Pat Conroy
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You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.
Pat Conroy
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Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.
Pat Conroy
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I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.
Pat Conroy
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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.
Pat Conroy
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Rape is a crime against sleep and memory it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
Pat Conroy