Missing Pat Conroy

The following is one of my favorite quotes from Pat Conroy. All though to be honest, all 
his words, whether quoted from him directly or written in one of his books, are some of 
my favorite quotes. 

“The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave 
anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the 
genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. 
Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a 
ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had 
nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in 
"Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my 
mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten 
thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers 
in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous 
English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and 
women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me 
when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English
language. ” 
― Pat Conroy

I think all writers have this same passion, some of us just take longer to get 
to the actual point in our lives that we put it all down. Some of us tell stories 
in our head and never get them out to share with the world. I do think the 
wonderful and amazing English teachers that I had over the years, that 
inspired me to never quit writing and to always do your best work. I hope 
my first written book, A Distance Between Us, will live up to that standard.