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0fe7dfd
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It was my own special brand of insanity that made me think the trials of Lucy's life could somehow be eased by the order of Tupperware.
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Ann Patchett |
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adaea51
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Bert . . . had grown up with frozen concentrate mixed into pitchers of water which, although he hadn't known it at the time, had nothing to do with orange juice. Now his children drank fresh-squeezed juice as thoughtlessly as he had drunk milk as a boy. They squeezed it from the fruit they had picked off the trees in their own backyard. He could see a new set of muscles in the right forearm of his wife, Teresa, from the constant twisting of..
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Ann Patchett |
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39598d3
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It's strange, when you think about all the worry he caused us, that
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Ann Patchett |
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c05b6d7
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The room was dark except for the light of her phone. She picked it up, even though nothing good ever came from answering the phone in the middle of the night. "Hello?" Franny said." --
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Ann Patchett |
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9157e65
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Zen- Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thu but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers.
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Ann Patchett |
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5322ff3
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Teresa kept sitting
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Ann Patchett |
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fa42a5a
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Lots of firemen got their start setting fires. They learn to set them, then they learn to put them out. Tom
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Ann Patchett |
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9a1d9df
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We set off walking backwards, thumbs out, trying to hitchhike to the postoperative breast augmentation appointment, perhaps a first in the state of Iowa.
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Ann Patchett |
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78d07ed
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Lucy was invisible, exuberant, and utterly birdlike in her wild, darting freedom.
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Ann Patchett |
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11aba47
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She ate from my plates and wore my clothes and slept in my bed like Goldilocks while the benevolent, lumbering bear went south for the holidays.
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Ann Patchett |
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e65ecc7
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but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
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Ann Patchett |
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f846543
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I was free to quit my day job, and that was, of course, the point at which I realized how much I liked my day job.
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Ann Patchett |
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0ef5cfc
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French wine was the cornerstone of French diplomacy. They handed it out like peppermints.
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Ann Patchett |
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32f508a
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finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling,'" Doyle said from memory. "' Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly."
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Ann Patchett |
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fc3bd39
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and while the Generals could care less about the requests of the other hostages they were quick to give in to her.
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Ann Patchett |
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ca033d4
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I'm not company. I'm your mother." She said it lightly."
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Ann Patchett |
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ebc2e18
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I still don't understand this," Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. "How did he wind up with my life?" "It isn't your life," Leo said. "That's what I'm trying to explain. It's my imagination."
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Ann Patchett |
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aa87cda
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But Dr. Rapp had no self-aggrandizing notions about his role in the tribe. He never set himself out to be the great white hero. He never took a single specimen more than what was absolutely needed. He disrupted nothing.
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Ann Patchett |
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f206374
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Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.) The
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Ann Patchett |
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7a416a4
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It's like a big circle. I've gone on a get-a-man crusade, but so far it's been a disaster and I'm feeling as bad about myself as I ever have. I know I'm a great person and all that, a good friend, but I feel like real bottom of the barrel girlfriend material.
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self-worth
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Ann Patchett |
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c52e181
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If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need.
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Ann Patchett |
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0f1ce63
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It was an awful thing to never really have the chance to hold somebody until she was dead.
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Ann Patchett |
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9a51422
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How much sadness could be averted by taking the time to notice all the people we have come to ignore? Would we in fact be safer and not more at risk if we asked someone to voice his feelings rather than wait until he looked for other means of making himself heard?
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Ann Patchett |
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48abbff
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further than five minutes ahead. But since I knew at the end of the week I couldn't go back, I called a lawyer.
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Ann Patchett |
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0ea46a8
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Marina filled her lungs with frozen air and smelled both winter and spring, dirt and leftover snow with the smallest undercurrent of something green.
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Ann Patchett |
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1126197
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I had no interest in starting over again, but there are some people whom we grant the role of oracle in our lives and when they speak--rarely, gravely--we are well-advised to listen.
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Ann Patchett |
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9d65398
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For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly , and from sources you never imagined to be probable.
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Ann Patchett |
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9b654ab
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You keep someone always for what he or she is worth to you, for what you can trade her for, money or freedom or somebody else you want more. Any person can be a kind of trading chip when you find a way to hold her.
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Ann Patchett |
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c1821ca
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It was her plan to outrun all of that, and somewhere in that running she had started to fly. She no longer felt like touching all the dirt and the muck she had so patiently submitted herself to so that people would think she was a very nice girl. She was not such a very nice girl. Nobody who was very, very nice would ever work this hard to take something they wanted only for themselves.
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Ann Patchett |
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a54b2e9
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I understood how we long to believe in goodness, especially in the person we promised to love and honor. It isn't just about them, it is how we want to see ourselves. It says that we are good people, patient and kind.
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Ann Patchett |
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e0f0594
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What we were told repeatedly was to listen: God had a vocation for all of us and if we paid close attention and were true to ourselves we would know His intention.
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Ann Patchett |
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ce6edec
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I like the Catholic Church," she says to me sometimes. "Good thing," I say, which always makes her laugh. I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible: bringing soup to the sick; visiting the widowed husbands of her friends who have died; sticking with the children who are slow to learn and teaching them how to"
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Ann Patchett |
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c2b7064
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The young
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Ann Patchett |
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9d398e2
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It turned out the real heartbreak of the vow of poverty was never being able to buy presents for the people who were so clearly in need.
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Ann Patchett |
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c82bdec
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I admire your patience.
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Ann Patchett |
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e7b4d6d
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The kind of love that offers itself so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
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Ann Patchett |
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a1159e6
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At first I thought the key would be to put the burden on my back rather than my brain, and so I worked as a restaurant cook and, later, as a waitress. And I was right, there was plenty of room in my head for stories, but because I fell asleep the minute I stopped moving, very few of those stories were ever written down. Once I realized that physical labor wasn't the answer, I switched to teaching--the universally suggested career for all M...
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Ann Patchett |
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b1f4864
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Clearly, we are not all ruined, and if we are, at some point it becomes our own responsibility.
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Ann Patchett |
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80d9c73
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Since my grandmother died, I have dreamed about her every night. I go back to The Neighborhood and I find her again. Her death was just a misunderstanding. She is better now, walking and laughing, telling me stories. She doesn't need me to take care of her anymore, and she has not come back to take care of me. We are simply together and glad for it. There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equal..
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Ann Patchett |
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af9e233
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people need to talk, and often a willingness to sit and listen is the greatest kindness one person can offer to another.
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Ann Patchett |
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0158890
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It was a time in my life when a Junior Mint could mean the difference between happiness and unhappiness.
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Ann Patchett |
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f03b98d
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I loved her even as she was swimming away from me, even as I was hating her. That's the way it is, when you've loved somebody your whole life. It's like a direction you go in, even when you don't want to go anymore.
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Ann Patchett |
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2cd3e4b
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while every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction. She was a snack plate, a buffet line, a woman dressed for springtime in the North
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Ann Patchett |
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94bc83b
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It was already in place, without him seeing any of it, the web was spun and snug around the house, and while his first impulse, the natural impulse, was to press ahead anyway and see if he might beat out the odds, clear logic held him.
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Ann Patchett |