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"I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in."
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Explore more quotes by Pat Conroy

"Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure."

"She had a grocer's faith in books, they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts."

"The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl."

"Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny."

"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."

"The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly."

"I do not think I was a hotheadnot then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life."
Exlpore more Relationship quotes

"A kind stranger is better than an uncaring friend."

"The more you are able to forgive then the more you are able to love."

"If you take a stand [for God] and mean it, you may suffer persecution. Some of your friends will drift away. They don't want to be with people like you. You speak to their conscience. They feel uncomfortable in your presence because you live for God."

"Trying to engage with an unapproachable person can lead to embarrassment, alienation, and resistance. Why would we set ourselves up for that kind of pain and failure? It's no wonder that people may avoid them-the risk of rejection is too great."

"Love is such a tremendous force of feeling! When you can't stop loving, you simply cannot stop it."

"For few matters you need to be solo, for some matters you need soul mate and for many matters you need society."

"Our relationship must be right with God before it can be right with man."

"Was Deirdre right about me purposely wanting relationships that were impossible?"

"Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal."

"Problem does not lie in being a husband, the problem is with acting as a husband (being bossy)."
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