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My Attraction To Story Is A Ceaseless Current That Runs Through The Center Of Me. My Inexhaustible Ardor For Reading Seems Connected To My Hunger For Storylines That Show Up In Both Books And In The Great Tumbling Chaos Of Life.

-Pat Conroy

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My Attraction To Story

Pat Conroy

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My Attraction To Story Is A Ceaseless Current That Runs Through The Center Of Me. My Inexhaustible Ardor For Reading Seems Connected To My Hunger For Storylines That Show Up In Both Books And In The Great Tumbling Chaos Of Life.

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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 Climates, But You Can Never Completely Escape The Sensuous, Semitropical Pull Of Charleston And Her Marshes.

Mountain Ranges

My Mother Raised Me To Be A Writer.

From The Very Beginning, I Wrote To Explain My Own Life To Myself, And I Invited Any Readers Who Chose To Make The Journey With Me To Join Me On The High Wire.

I Was Born And Raised On A Carolina Sea Island And I Carried The Sunshine Of The Low-country, Inked In Dark Gold, On My Back And Shoulders.

I Still Write In Long Hand. I Type Like A Chimpanzee.

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.

Why Do They Not Teach You That Time Is A Finger Snap And An Eye Blink, And That You Should Not Allow A Moment To Pass You By Without Taking Joyous, Ecstatic Note Of It, Not Wasting A Single Moment Of Its Swift, Breakneck Circuit?

Live In The Moment

Love's Action. It Isn't Talk And It Never Has Been.

The Pursuit Of Greatness Means That Laziness Has No Place In Your Life.

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.

Honor Is The Presence Of God In Man.

Presence Of God

Rape Is A Crime Against Sleep And Memory; It's Afterimage Imprints Itself Like An Irreversible Negative From The Camera Obscura Of Dreams.

I Prayed Hard And Only Gradually Became Aware That This Fierce Praying Was A Way Of Finding Prologue And Entrance Into My Own Writing. This Came As Both Astonishment And Relief. When I Thought God Had Abandoned Me, I Discovered That He Had Simply Given Me A Different Voice To Praise The Inexhaustible Beauty Of The Made World.

When Men Talk About The Agony Of Being Men, They Can Never Quite Get Away From The Recurrent Theme Of Self-pity. And When Women Talk About Being Women, They Can Never Quite Get Away From The Recurrent Theme Of Blaming Men.

To Describe Our Growing Up In The Lowcountry Of South Carolina, I Would Have To Take You To The Marsh On A Spring Day, Flush The Great Blue Heron From Its Silent Occupation, Scatter Marsh Hens As We Sink To Our Knees In Mud, Open An Oyster With A Pocketknife And Feed It To You From The Shell And Say, 'there. That Taste. That's The Taste Of My Childhood.'

... Silence (can) Be The Most Eloquent Form Of Lying.

The Mind Is An Intricate Mechanism That Can Be Run On The Fuels Of Both Victory And Defeatism.

Each Divorce Is The Death Of A Small Civilization.

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.

Like Everything Else, Love's Not Worth Much Without Some Action To Back It Up.

My Mother Thought Of My Father As Half Barbarian And Half Blunt Instrument, And She Isolated Him From His Children.

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.

Knowing Nothing

There Are No Verdicts To Childhood, Only Consequences, And The Bright Freight Of Memory.

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.

Love Had Always Issued Out Of The Places That Hurt The Most.

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.

Through Sports A Coach Can Offer A Boy A Secret Way To Sneak Up On The Mystery That Is Manhood.

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.

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.

... The Wing Of A Fly Is Proof Enough Of The Existence Of God For Me.

I Learned That If I Could Read, I Could Cook. I Surprised Myself I Like It.

Mama Always Taught Her Children That Words Were Pretty, But Anyone Can Talk. She Said, Pay Attention To That Man Or Woman Who Acted, Who Did, Who Performed. She Taught Us To Trust In Thing We Could See, Not That We Heard.

She Had Awakened Something In Him That Had Slumbered Far Too Long. Not Only Did He Feel Passion, He Felt The Return Of Hope.

A Library Could Show You Everything If You Knew Where To Look.

In Families, There Are No Crimes Beyond Forgiveness.

Once You Have Traveled, The Voyage Never Ends.

He Was One Of Those Rare Men Who Are Capable Of Being Fully In Love Only Once In Their Lives.

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.

Evil Would Always Come To Me Disguised In Systems And Dignified By Law.

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I Lived With The Terrible Knowledge That One Day I Would Be An Old Man Still Waiting For My Real Life To Start. Already, I Pitied That Old Man.

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.

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

If Not For Sports, I Do Not Think My Father Would Have Ever Talked To Me.

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I've Always Found Paranoia To Be A Perfectly Defensible Position.

It Is An Art Form To Hate New York City Properly. So Far I Have Always Been A Featherweight Debunker Of New York; It Takes Too Much Energy And Endurance To Record The Infinite Number Of Ways The City Offends Me.

(you) Don't Leave The Chicken To Watch The Feed.

My Attraction To Story Is A Ceaseless Current That Runs Through The Center Of Me. My Inexhaustible Ardor For Reading Seems Connected To My Hunger For Storylines That Show Up In Both Books And In The Great Tumbling Chaos Of Life.

...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 Our Burning Spirits, Our Life's Work.

Red Hook Road Made Me Happy, And Happy To Be Alive. It Took Me Out Of My Home On The Coast Of South Carolina, Placed Me In The Town Along Red Hook Road, And Changed Me The Way Good Books Always Do.

Her Laughter Was A Shiny Thing, Like Pewter Flung High In The Air.

Here's What I Love: When A Great Writer Turns Me Into A Jew From Chicago, A Lesbian Out Of South Carolina, Or A Black Woman Moving Into A Subway Entrance In Harlem. Turn Me Into Something Else, Writers Of The World. Make Me Muslim, Heretic, Hermaphrodite. Put Me Into A Crusader's Armor, A Cardinal's Vestments. Let Me Feel The Pygmy's Heartbeat, The Queen's Breast, The Torturer's Pleasure, The Nile's Taste, Or The Nomad's Thirst. Tell Me Everything That I Must Know. Hold Nothing Back.

One Does Not Know Where Love Will Take You.

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Writing Poetry And Reading Books Causes Brain Damage.

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Fantasy Is One Of The Soul's Brighter Porcelains.

I Was The Only Person In The World Who Thought It Was A Military Duty To Appear To Be In A Good Mood.

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.

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.

It Is The Secret Life That Sustains Me Now, And As I Reach The Top Of That Bridge I Say It In A Whisper, I Say It As A Prayer, As Regret, And As Praise. I Can't Tell You Why I Do It Or What It Means, But Each Night When I Drive Toward My Southern Home And My Southern Life, I Whisper These Words: 'lowenstein, Lowenstein.

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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.

Good Writing Is The Hardest Form Of Thinking.

But No One Walks Out Of His Family Without Reprisals: A Family Is Too Disciplined An Army To Offer Compassion To Its Deserters.

My Father Wouldn't Let Me Take Typing In Childhood.

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The Most Powerful Words In English Are 'tell Me A Story,' Words That Are Intimately Related To The Complexity Of History, The Origins Of Language, The Continuity Of The Species, The Taproot Of Our Humanity, Our Singularity, And Art Itself. 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 Had To Like That Trend Or Go Along With It. I Fight Against These Movements With Every Book I Write.

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My Wound Is Geography. It Is Also My Anchorage, My Port Of Call.

Because She Deserved My Tears If Anyone On Earth Ever Did. I Could Feel The Tears Within Me, Undiscovered, And Untouched In Their Inland Sea. Those Tears Had Been With Me Always.

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.

Writing Is The Only Way I Have To Explain My Own Life To Myself.

I Think I Learned About The Relationship Between Books And Life From Margaret Mitchell.

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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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William Ferris Has Long Reigned As The Unimpeachable Source Of The Entire Southern Experience. His Work On Southern Folklore And The Composition Of The Encyclopedia Of Southern Culture Have Made Him Both Legendary And Necessary. His Book, The Storied South , Is A Love Song To The South Bill Helped Illuminate. It's A Crowning Achievement Of His Own Storied Career.

Craziness Attacks The Softest Eyes And Hamstrings The Gentlest Flanks.

We've Pretended Too Much In Our Family, Luke, And Hidden Far Too Much. I Think We're All Going To Pay A High Price For Our Inability To Face The Truth.

The Most Powerful Words In English Are, 'tell Me A Story.'

Here's What I Want From A Book, What I Demand, What I Pray For When I Take Up A Novel And Begin To Read The First Sentence: I Want Everything And Nothing Less, The Full Measure Of A Writer's Heart. I Want A Novel So Poetic That I Do Not Have To Turn To The Standby Anthologies Of Poetry To Satisfy That Itch For Music, For Perfection And Economy Of Phrasing, For Exactness Of Tone. Then, Too, I Want A Book So Filled With Story And Character That I Read Page After Page Without Thinking Of Food Or Drink Because A Writer Has Possessed Me, Crazed With An Unappeasable Thirst To Know What Happens Next.

Walking The Streets Of Charleston In The Late Afternoons Of August Was Like Walking Through Gauze Or Inhaling Damaged Silk.

The University Of South Carolina Has Always Played A Role In My Life And The Intellectual Life Of South Carolina.

The Only Word For Goodness Is Goodness, And It Is Not Enough.

I Loved My Parents... But That Can Never Change The Fact That My Father's Violence Ruined My Childhood.

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

Carolina Beach Music," Dupree Said, Coming Up On The Porch. "the Holiest Sound On Earth.

Baseball Fans Love Numbers. They Love To Swirl Them Around Their Mouths Like Bordeaux Wine.

But Even Her Demons She Invested With Inordinate Beauty, Consecrated Them With The Dignity Of Her Attention.

A Story Untold Could Be The One That Kills You.

There Is No Teacher More Discriminating Or Transforming Than Loss.

In Charleston, More Than Elsewhere, You Get The Feeling That The Twentieth Century Is A Vast, Unconscionable Mistake.

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.

I've Always Believed That Dreams Were Both The Love Letters And The Hate Mail Of The Subconscious.

When I Was 5 Years Old, My Mother Read Me 'gone With The Wind' At Night, Before I Went To Bed. I Remember Her Reading Almost All Year.

Losing Prepares You For The Heartbreak, Setback, And The Tragedy That You Will Encounter In The World More Than Winning Ever Can. By Licking Your Wounds You Learn How To Avoid Getting Wounded The Next Time.

Some Things Don’t Mix. Some Things Don’t Mix At All, But Sometimes In Life You Have To Take The Risk.

Sometimes In Life

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.

Every Athlete Learns By Theft And Mimicry.

The English Language On Her Tongue Became A Smoke-screen, Without Her Eyes Changing Expression In The Least.

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.

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.

I Would Always Be A Better Hater Of Things And Institutions Than A Lover Of Them.

One Can Learn Anything, Anything At All, I Thought, If Provided By A Gifted And Passionate Teacher.

Happiness Is An Accident Of Nature, A Beautiful And Flawless Aberration.

Humanity Is Best Described As Inhumanity.

…then Another Porpoise Broke The Water And Rolled Toward Us. A Third And Fourth Porpoise Neared. The Visitation Was Something So Rare And Perfect That We Knew By Instinct Not To Speak—and Then As Quickly As They Had Come, The Porpoises Moved Away From Us…each Of Us Would Remember That All During Our Lives. It Was The Purest Moment Of Freedom And Headlong Exhilaration That I Had Ever Felt. A Wordless Covenant Was Set, And I Would Go Back In My Imagination, And Return To Where Happiness Seemed So Easy To Touch.

The World Of Literature Has Everything In It, And It Refuses To Leave

I Only Hope To Do Well Enough Before I Die To Have A House As Big As My Rich Uncle Ed And Aunt Carole.

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.

The Fruit Tasted Foreign But Indigenous, Like Sunlight A Tree Had Changed Through Patience.

Writing Has Never Been That Simple For Me.

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.

Of The Yamacraw Children, I Can Say Little. I Don't Think I Changed The Quality Of Their Lives Significantly Or Altered The Inexorable Fact That They Were Imprisoned By The Very Circumstance Of Their Birth.

Families Without Songs Are Unhappy Families.

We Wait For The Tortoises To Come. We Wait For That Lady Who Walks Them. That’s How Art Works. It’s Never A Jackrabbit, Or A Racehorse. It’s The Tortoises That Hold All The Secrets. We’ve Got To Be Patient Enough To Wait For Them.

There's No Word In The Language I Revere More Than 'teacher.' My Heart Sings When A Kid Refers To Me As His Teacher, And It Always Has. I've Honored Myself And The Entire Family Of Man By Becoming A Teacher.

Those Wishing To Be Successful In The Market Can't Ignore The Boomer Numbers, The Wealth And Spending Power They Have.

Music Could Ache And Hurt, That Beautiful Music Was A Place A Suffering Man Could Hide.

I Had Come To A Place Where I Was Meant To Be. I Don't Mean Anything So Prosaic As A Sense Of Coming Home. This Was Different, Very Different. It Was Like Arriving At A Place Much Safer Than Home.

It Enclosed Us In Its Laceries As We Watched The Moon Spill Across The Atlantic Like Wine From An Overturned Glass. With The Light All Around Us, We Felt Secret In That Moon-infused Water Like Pearls Forming In The Soft Tissues Of Oysters.

Know This. I Think You Could Be Special If You Only Thought There Was Anything Special About Yourself.

Isn't It A Shame Military Doctors Couldn't Be As Good As Military Sunglasses?

My Mother, Southern To The Bone, Once Told Me, “all Southern Literature Can Be Summed Up In These Words: ‘on The Night The Hogs Ate Willie, Mama Died When She Heard What Daddy Did To Sister.’” She Raised Me Up To Be A Southern Writer, But It Wasn’t Easy.

There Is No Downside To Winning. It Feels Forever Fabulous.

I Could Bear The Memory, But I Could Not Bear The Music That Made The Memory Such A Killing Thing.

South Carolina Is Not A State; It Is A Cult.

My Soul Found Ease And Rest In The Companionship Of Books.

I Wrote To Explain My Own Life To Myself, Stories Are The Vessels I Use To Interpret The World To Myself.

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.

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.

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