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101 " People 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 , A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
102 " Rape 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 compensation "
― Pat Conroy , The Prince of Tides
103 " Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen. "
104 " There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help. "
― Pat Conroy , The Lords of Discipline
105 " The 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. "
106 " An 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 , My Losing Season: A Memoir
107 " I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards. "
108 " I 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. "
109 " Teaching 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. "
110 " Though 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. "
111 " Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers "
― Pat Conroy
112 " The 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 , South of Broad
113 " One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher. "
― Pat Conroy , Beach Music
114 " Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else. "
115 " Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law. "
116 " I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake. "
― Pat Conroy , My Reading Life
117 " Because I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing. "
118 " I was a watchful boy being raised by a father I didn’t admire. In a desperate way, I needed the guidance of someone who could show me another way of becoming a man. It was sometime during the year when I decided I would become the kind of man that Bill Dufford was born to be. I wanted to be the type of man that a whole town could respect and honor and fall in love with—the way Beaufort did when Bill Dufford came to town to teach and shape and turn its children into the best citizens they could be. "
119 " I’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort. "
120 " We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America. "