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I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world 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
Interpret
Vessel
Explain
Wrote
Use
Stories
Life
World
Vessels

More quotes by Pat Conroy

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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
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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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.
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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.
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Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
Pat Conroy
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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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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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Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
Pat Conroy
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Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
Pat Conroy
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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.
Pat Conroy
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Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
Pat Conroy
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My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one.
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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Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
Pat Conroy