“Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“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.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“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.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“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.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“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.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“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.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“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.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“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.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“…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.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Words are pretty, but anyone can talk. Pay attention to the people who perform.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from Beach Music
“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, quote from Beach Music
“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, quote from Beach Music
Pat Conroy
Born place: in Atlanta, Georgia, The United States
Born date October 26, 1945
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“Jesus," Kerensky said, looking around. "You people. I have one of the most incredible experiences I'll ever have, talking with the one person who really gets me - who really understands me - and you're all down here thinking I'm performing some sort of time-travelling incestuous masturbation thing.”
― John Scalzi, quote from Redshirts
“Talvin Singh, Thievery Corporation, A.R. Rahman, AmarBaaba Maal, Asian Dub Foundation, Autechre, Badmarsh and Sri, Bjork, Black Star Liner, The Blue Nile, Boards of Canada, The Chemical Brothers, Dead Can Dance, The Fake Portishead, Future Sound of London, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Goldfrapp, Jamyang, Joi, Jeff Buckley, Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham: original movie soundtrack, Nitin Sawhney, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Rakesh Chaurasia, Sigur Rós, State of Bengal.”
― Ian McDonald, quote from River of Gods
“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot
“Well, that's pretty much what the schools are like, I think: they reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. If you happen to be a little innovative, or maybe you forgot to come to school one day because you were reading a book or something, that's a tragedy, that's a crime―because you're not supposed to think, you're supposed to obey, and just proceed through the material in whatever way they require.
And in fact, most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they've been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years―that's the way I did it, for example. Like, you're told by some stupid teacher, "Do this," which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you work your way through and they give you your letters: an awful lot of education is like that, from the very beginning. Some people go along with it because they figure, "Okay, I'll do any stupid thing that asshole says because I want to get ahead"; others do it because they've just internalized the values―but after a while, those two things tend to get sort of blurred. But you do it, or else you're out: you ask too many questions and you're going to get in trouble.
Now, there are also people who don't go along-and they're called "behavior problems," or "unmotivated," or things like that. Well, you don't want to be too glib about it―there are children with behavior problems but a lot of them are just independent-minded, or don't like to conform, or just want to go their own way. And they get into trouble right from the very beginning, and are typically weeded out. I mean, I've taught young kids too, and the fact is there are always some who just don't take your word for it. And the very unfortunate tendency is to try to beat them down, because they're a pain in the neck. But what they ought to be is encouraged. Yeah: why take my word for it? Who the heck am I? Figure it out for yourself. That's what real education would be about, in fact.”
― Noam Chomsky, quote from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
“Sometimes I wonder if you should be on medication," Charlie said. "It can't be healthy to have you thinking all by yourself without some kind of pharmaceutical intervention.”
― T.J. Klune, quote from Tell Me It's Real
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The Thief's DaughterBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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