|
6b81484
|
In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
5a0e50b
|
Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.
|
|
destiny
island
south-carolina
landscape
luck
|
Pat Conroy |
|
9328399
|
It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.
|
|
god
|
Pat Conroy |
|
de1b0ae
|
My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
c4dcbf1
|
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
|
|
development
childhood
parenthood
|
Pat Conroy |
|
9ae6746
|
One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
53a9985
|
Words are pretty, but anyone can talk. Pay attention to the people who perform.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
db80ba8
|
It's the southern way, Doctor." "The southern way?" she said. "My mother's immortal phrase. We laugh when the pain gets too much. We laugh when the pity of human life gets too . . . pitiful. We laugh when there's nothing else to do." "When do you weep . . . according to the southern way?" "After we laugh, Doctor. Always. Always after we laugh."
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
f3b82bd
|
Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
|
|
love
hurt
|
Pat Conroy |
|
b7348b0
|
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.
|
|
south-carolina
spring
small-town
nostalgia
|
Pat Conroy |
|
bb19dde
|
The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.
|
|
passion
skills
hobby
|
Pat Conroy |
|
e3eb0ad
|
I blaze with a deep sullen magic, smell lust like a heron on fire; all words I form into castles then storm them with soldiers of air. What I seek is not there for asking. My armies are fit and well trained. This poet will trust her battalions to fashion her words into blades. At dawn I shall ask them for beauty, for proof that their training went well. At night I shall beg their forgiveness as I cut their throats by the hill. My navies adv..
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
057799a
|
Her secret, we would discover, was that once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
8a30c55
|
Perfect doesn't just mean happy. Perfect can have lots of different parts. - Niles.
|
|
south-of-broad
|
Pat Conroy |
|
ef295d5
|
Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
c93318f
|
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.
|
|
writer
novelist
write
|
Pat Conroy |
|
a2712d1
|
Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
|
|
mentoring
teaching
|
Pat Conroy |
|
f3e1f8e
|
And I was glad she had the camera as a fence to protect herself, an excuse to be invisible. Cameras are a lifesaver for the very shy people who have nowhere else to hide.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
5385ef1
|
The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man."
|
|
maturity
manhood
|
Pat Conroy |
|
085691b
|
I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eye..
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
1946433
|
I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
21e1595
|
when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of..
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
d73e9e0
|
Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
fc042b5
|
I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was bet..
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
07aa853
|
He treated the stars as though they were love songs written to him by God.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
4e1adc1
|
They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull .
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
19cb0fb
|
My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
47b0d89
|
Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the ..
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
fd815c5
|
Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the safe protectorate of his soft, uncritical maleness, I never wholly appreciated him. I did not know how to cherish sanctity, and I had no way of honoring, of giving small voice to the praise of such natural innocence, such a generous simplicity. Now I know that a part of..
|
|
worship
praise
|
Pat Conroy |
|
1bf42bf
|
Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
a8e2138
|
A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.
|
|
rights
surrender
|
Pat Conroy |
|
02ac3b9
|
From the beginning I've searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through the complicated life of books that try to..
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
c715817
|
Her view of men was one-dimensional, but not inaccurate: men were prisoners of their genitalia and women were the keepers of the keys to paradise.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
10e6a1b
|
Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, ..
|
|
language
|
Pat Conroy |
|
a8d5c2b
|
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 |
|
8f94395
|
The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story."
|
|
imagination
narrative
storytelling
|
Pat Conroy |
|
1e8a877
|
It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.
|
|
self-awareness
humility
|
Pat Conroy |
|
a5c72d5
|
I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class
|
|
curiosity
consumerism
|
Pat Conroy |
|
c7538bb
|
As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.
|
|
maturity
parenting
|
Pat Conroy |
|
570a806
|
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 |
|
573637d
|
She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
836cc5b
|
Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.
|
|
pain
suffering
|
Pat Conroy |
|
8368b50
|
It was a time in my life when many things bored me deeply and I hungered for beauty and those realms of pure elation granted to those who had the imagination to know what to look for and how to find it.
|
|
|
Pat Conroy |
|
fa837b5
|
The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.
|
|
optimism
emotions
thinking
pessimism
|
Pat Conroy |