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ee205d4
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You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.
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reading
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Pat Conroy |
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11c7f57
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Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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Pat Conroy |
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e4c0bd5
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Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
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Pat Conroy |
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412a563
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The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "U..
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literature
reading
teachers
english
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Pat Conroy |
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568052a
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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.
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Pat Conroy |
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02ed734
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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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Pat Conroy |
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c55cbf4
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My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
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Pat Conroy |
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05e3438
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I've never had anyone's approval, so I've learned to live without it.
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Pat Conroy |
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f474a3b
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No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.
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Pat Conroy |
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23820b7
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I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
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inspirational
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Pat Conroy |
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1a93bc5
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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.
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Pat Conroy |
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548eee0
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I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
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Pat Conroy |
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7eb48a2
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Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary
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Pat Conroy |
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c0f7ad6
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Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next 10 years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.
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Pat Conroy |
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c697ea9
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Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.
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Pat Conroy |
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916754b
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There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
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Pat Conroy |
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76f3bc2
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Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.
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Pat Conroy |
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9346420
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The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask.
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Pat Conroy |
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24ebf87
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These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.
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memories
heart
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Pat Conroy |
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9ab9337
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Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.
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Pat Conroy |
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bdf4918
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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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Pat Conroy |
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31a8df1
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Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
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leadership
mentoring
encouragement
teaching
parenthood
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Pat Conroy |
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47c4bad
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We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.
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Pat Conroy |
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8be6649
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Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.
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Pat Conroy |
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2812bfe
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Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.
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Pat Conroy |
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2fa17fa
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The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.
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Pat Conroy |
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b4e8d16
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Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It 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. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent ..
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Pat Conroy |
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e2c1ab8
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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.
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Pat Conroy |
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0e8821a
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What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts
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Pat Conroy |
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206324f
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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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Pat Conroy |
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9f91a05
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A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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Pat Conroy |
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fbcb661
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There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
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loss
teacher
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Pat Conroy |
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cab5c68
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Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth."
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south-carolina
south
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Pat Conroy |
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3ee40f8
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But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
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Pat Conroy |
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afc2358
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Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.
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Pat Conroy |
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8ae085a
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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.
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Pat Conroy |
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c1738f8
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Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined..
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passion
teaching
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Pat Conroy |
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b25b6ad
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Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation
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rape
violence
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Pat Conroy |
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5ef1eaf
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Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.
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remembering-quotes-from-books
underlining-books
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Pat Conroy |
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501e928
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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.
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Pat Conroy |
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e2fa6bf
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There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
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the-south
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Pat Conroy |
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5e3fada
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Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climate..
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Pat Conroy |
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2cc847e
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A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
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library
reading
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Pat Conroy |
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a26d463
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Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.
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reflection
journaling
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Pat Conroy |