01c. 1980 ADI've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
02c. 1980 ADGood writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
03c. 1980 ADYou're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
04c. 1980 ADTeach 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.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
05c. 1980 ADWhat'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 shiftsPat Conroy / quote ↗
07c. 1980 ADYou 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 / quote ↗
08c. 1980 ADA new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
09c. 1980 ADFrom the beginning, I’ve told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I’m the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
10c. 1980 ADA nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
11c. 1980 ADPeople give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
12c. 1980 ADWasn't Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year?" "Yes, but the airport's perfectly safe.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
13c. 1980 ADRape 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 compensationPat Conroy / quote ↗
14c. 1980 ADViolence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
15c. 1980 ADThere was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
16c. 1980 ADThe Bear had once confided to me that Durrell's ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals. If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
17c. 1980 ADAn author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
18c. 1980 ADI loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
19c. 1980 ADI consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
20c. 1980 ADTeaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
21c. 1980 ADThough I’ve never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones, those who must teach in public schools when the whole nation seems at war with the very essence of teaching.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
22c. 1980 ADGreat words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readersPat Conroy / quote ↗
23c. 1980 ADThe narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
24c. 1980 ADOne can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.Pat Conroy / quote ↗
