Gratitude

I am almost done with this book. My Commonplace Book, which I just call my journal,is fully of quotes of Pat Conroy's authors that helped make him a writer.

For Ann Voskamp:

             " I am numb with gratitude."

"When Dickey is writing at his best, it is like listening to God singing  in cantos and fragments about the hard dreaming required for the creation of the world."

For Laura Barkat:

"When I read James Dickey , I was transported into that ecstatic country where poetry and poetry alone can take you, and shake you with the cutting edge of beauty and hammerlock of its language."



" I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to have poetry anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection, and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone."


For Nancy:


"In habit lies safety."

" Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence." 



Other authors covered by Conroy: Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND ( his mother read it to him at age 5) , The New York Book Shop in Atlanta where he read and read, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dicken's Christmas Carol to Gullah speaking kids on Daufuskie Island and tonight I will read the last chapter:
                        The City.