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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
Wrote
Use
Stories
Life
World
Vessels
Interpret
Vessel
Explain

More quotes by Pat Conroy

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I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it.
Pat Conroy
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My mother raised me to be a writer.
Pat Conroy
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The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
Pat Conroy
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Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.
Pat Conroy
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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.
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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Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.
Pat Conroy
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I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
Pat Conroy
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My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.
Pat Conroy
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A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
Pat Conroy
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Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
Pat Conroy
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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.
Pat Conroy
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I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.
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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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
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I don't believe in happy families.
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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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