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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
Vessel
Explain
Wrote
Use
Stories
Life
World
Vessels
Interpret

More quotes by 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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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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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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Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.
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... the wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.
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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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My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
Pat Conroy
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Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.
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... silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.
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She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
Pat Conroy
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The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
Pat Conroy
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A story untold could be the one that kills you.
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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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
Pat Conroy
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Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
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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I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.
Pat Conroy
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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.
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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The safe places could only be visited they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
Pat Conroy