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" A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground. "
Pat Conroy
Too
Group
Family
Related Quotes:
" The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina. "
Pat Conroy
Always
My Life
Life
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Night
Reading
Wind
" The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do. "
Pat Conroy
Childhood
Great
Now
" I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father. "
Pat Conroy
Love
Page
Think
" I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate. "
Pat Conroy
Long
Before
Hate
" There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people. "
Pat Conroy
Better
Always
People
" I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell. "
Pat Conroy
About
Relationship
Life
" I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course. "
Pat Conroy
Screwed
Writing
Mistakes
" I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.' "
Pat Conroy
Now
School
Think
" My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own. "
Pat Conroy
My Own
Own
Fear
" Writing has never been that simple for me. "
Pat Conroy
Simple
Writing
Been
" 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. "
Pat Conroy
Story
Art
History
" Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.' "
Pat Conroy
Style
Perfection
Great
" Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling. "
Pat Conroy
Imagination
More
Writing
" When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia. "
Pat Conroy
Soul
Man
Long
" I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me. "
Pat Conroy
Child
Being Nice
See
" I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole. "
Pat Conroy
Uncle
Die
House
" My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life. "
Pat Conroy
Life
Father
My Life
" Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I remain her enthusiast, her evangelist, her acolyte, and her grateful student. She taught me that cooking and storytelling make the most delightful coconspirators. "
Pat Conroy
She
Remember
Me
" Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges. "
Pat Conroy
Opportunities
Aging
Challenges
" I'm not the lovable, wonderful, tenderhearted grandfather that you read about in books. I'm grouchy and curmudgeonly, and I have a lot of rules. "
Pat Conroy
Grandfather
You
Rules
" I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange. "
Pat Conroy
Human Nature
Bit
Nature
" A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire. "
Pat Conroy
Journey
Life
Great
" Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks. "
Pat Conroy
Away
American
Writing
" I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta. "
Pat Conroy
Imagination
Girl
Wind
" When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome. "
Pat Conroy
Tried
Rome
Music
" I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival. "
Pat Conroy
Inspired
Who
Now
" A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal. "
Pat Conroy
Story
Good
Good Meal
" I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character. "
Pat Conroy
Family
People
Say
" I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.' "
Pat Conroy
Know
Parents
Me