My Reading Life (2010) (edit title/settings)

Quotes edit see section history

• “She was as friendly as a cow turd on an altar step. pg. 180”

  Pat Conroy discussing his first meeting with Alice Walker

• “Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart. pg. 111.”

  Pat Conroy

• “Parisians and polar icecaps have a lot in common except that polar icecaps are warmer to strangers. There is something glacial, fishlike, and prodigiously remote about Parisians. At the sound o fan approaching foreigner, their faces are as bland and expressionless as salamanders. When they fix you in their imperious stares, it is as if they are studying you from the raised periscopes of submarines right before they blow you out of the water. In Europe, climate shapes character, and the Parisians have been left out in the rain too long. pg. 208.”

  Pat Conroy

• “France is the only country in the world where friendliness is one of the seven deadly sins. pg. 208.”

  Pat Conroy

• “I do not like my prose to be used as a nonaddictive substitute for Seconal. pg. 216.”

  Pat Conroy

• “All French waiters seem like direct descendants of those hooded men who worked the guillotine for the Directory, and Mr. Hara held them all in bristling contempt. pg. 222.”

  Pat Conroy

• “I did not know that words could pour through me like honey through a burst hive or that gardens seeded in dark secrecy could bloom along the borders of my half-ruined boyhood because a writer could touch me in all the broken places with his art. pg.240.”

  Pat Conroy

• “I wanted to be lit up, all the cities and all the hill towns within me sacked and torn to the ground and the crops destroyed and the earth salted. pg. 243.”

  Pat Conroy

• “Tolstoy does not provide all the answers to the problems of modern warfare, but he certainly can help you grasp some of the essential questions you should ask yourself before sending your soldiers across a border that is not your own. pg. 280.”

  Pat Conroy

• “I don't care if James Dickey slept with a thousand women or the entire football team at Clemson or the marching band at Vanderbilt or every animal in the San Diego Zoo, including the duck-billed playpus, the Gaboon viper, or the last ivory-billed woodpecker on the planet. If Dickey had mated with a dozen lionesses on the Serengeti plain after they had killed a water buffalo, and a race of manticores had issued from the union, it would not make me love his writing less. pg. 283.”

  Pat Conroy

• “Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dickey across the land. pg. 299”

  Pat Conroy

• “The most powerful words in English are "tell me a story,"... pg. 303”

  Pat Conroy

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

  Highlighted by 188 Kindle customers

• Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.

  Highlighted by 181 Kindle customers

• This book demonstrates again and again that there is no passion more rewarding than reading itself, that it remains the best way to dream and to feel the sheer carnal joy of being fully and openly alive.

  Highlighted by 172 Kindle customers

• Great books invited argument and disagreement, but ignorance did not even earn a place at the table when ideas were the subject of dispute.

  Highlighted by 163 Kindle customers

• If there is more important work than teaching, I hope to learn about it before I die.

  Highlighted by 154 Kindle customers

• Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers. From the beginning I’ve searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through a complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die.

  Highlighted by 141 Kindle customers

• Good writing is one of the forms that hard labor takes. It is neither roadhouse nor weigh station, but much more like some unnameable station of the cross. It is taking the nothingness of air and turning it into a pleasure palace built on a foundation of words.

  Highlighted by 121 Kindle customers

• The book was Growth of the Soil by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun.

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• 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.

  Highlighted by 111 Kindle customers

• Writers of the world, if you’ve got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. My soul will dance with pleasure, and it’ll change the quality of all my waking hours. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for a story to save my own life. Always. It clears the way for me and makes me resistant to all the false promises signified by the ring of power. In every great story, I encounter a head-on collision with self and imagination.

  Highlighted by 95 Kindle customers

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• ebullience: high spirits; exuberance; exhileration
• obsequious: obedient; dutiful
• temerity: reckless boldness; rashness
• sangfroid: coolness of mind; calmness; composure
• clochard: beggar; tramp; vagrant
• demimonde: (esp. during the last half of the 19th century) a class of women who have lost their standing in respectable society because of indiscreet behavior or sexual promiscuity; prostitutes or courtesans in general; a group whose activities are ethically or legally questionable
• arrondissement: largest administrative division of a French dept., comprising a number of cantons; an administrative district of certain large cities in France
• helot: serf or slave; bondman
• amanuensis: a person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another; secretary
• phoneme: any of a small set of units, usually about 20 or 30 in number, and different for each language, considered to be the basic distinctive units of speech sound by which morphemes, words, and sentences are represented
• bonhomie: frank and simple good-heartedness; a good-natured manner; friendliness; geniality
• gendarme: a police officer in any of several European countries, esp. a French police officer
• doggerel: comic or burlesque, and usually loose or irregular in measure; rude; crude; poor
• alexin: (immunology) complement
• slattern: a slovenly, untidy woman or girl; a slut; harlot
• didactic: intended for instruction; instructive; teaching or intending to teach a moral lesson
• ordure: dung; manure; excrement

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Pat Conroy (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history