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46acd2d
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She didn't even think about the drive. She was from Los Angeles; driving was simply part of it.
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Ann Patchett |
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3df2039
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Politicians never mentioned the details of life because of course the details that appealed to one person could repel another, so what you wound up with in the end were a long string of generalities, stirring platitudes that could not buy you supper.
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Ann Patchett |
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6636b50
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Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view?
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Ann Patchett |
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db13ba6
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His understanding that he would eventually lose every sweetness that had come to him only made him hold those very things closer to his chest.
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Ann Patchett |
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9026fdf
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In that way the accident was like his mother's death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different intervals but always there. It happened in the past and it was always happening. It happened every single minute of the day.
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Ann Patchett |
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af5c19b
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Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling
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Ann Patchett |
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d796ea7
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had been looking. The water on the glass was steady
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Ann Patchett |
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c777feb
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stayed with her, that she would think, even for an instant, of not shooting her father as failing him
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Ann Patchett |
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fc034e2
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I've never believed the women of the world are entitled to leave every one of their options open for a lifetime.
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Ann Patchett |
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4de3586
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What is it you said to me just now? There was a time? Maybe there was a time. To tell you the truth I can't remember. From where I sit I would tell you that having a child is akin to plotting your own death, but I delivered thousands and thousands of babies in my day and it seemed at least in that moment many of the mothers were happy. I know it wasn't like this for the young."Dr. Swenson closed her eyes and though her head stayed balanced ..
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Ann Patchett |
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e89a721
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towheads, the older one only slightly darker. He was looking at a picture of Anders with his arms around his wife and in that photo they were not much older than children themselves. There were pictures of birds, too, a group of prairie chickens standing in a field, an eastern bluebird so vibrant it appeared to have been Photoshopped. Anders took a lot of pictures of birds. Karen pulled off her hat and pushed her straight pale hair behind h..
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Ann Patchett |
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07a750c
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The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.
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Ann Patchett |
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36aa0cd
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Most of the time we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do." "But the other is better," Gen said. Roxane pulled her feet into her chair and hugged her knees to her chest. "Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flat- tering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know y..
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Ann Patchett |
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259c23a
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Writing must not be compartmentalized. You don't step outside of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life. And who you were as a mother, a teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person...People ask me if writing can be taught, and yes, I can teach you to write a better sentence, to construct dialogue, to develop a plot. But I can't teach you how to have something to say.
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Ann Patchett |
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04a0f48
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better to have done something, to have stood for something great and gotten shot for it than it was to never stand up for anything and die like everybody else.
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Ann Patchett |
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d912ee3
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Karl was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1947. His parents stayed married, as did the parents of his friends. His mother still lives in the house they moved to the year Karl turned one. He walked down the street to school. I was born in Los Angeles in 1963. By the time I started college I had moved fifteen times. We saw different movies, read different books. I never had a single date in high school, but when I went with Karl to his high ..
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Ann Patchett |
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d068b88
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Karl was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1947. His parents stayed married, as did the parents of his friends. His mother still lives in the house they moved to the year Karl turned one. He walked down the street to school. I was born in Los Angeles in 1963. By the time I started college I had moved fifteen times. We saw different movies, read different books. I never had a single date in high school, but when I went with Karl to his high ..
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Ann Patchett |
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cdf5863
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If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say. Write the story, learn from it, put it away, write another story.
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Ann Patchett |
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749bd83
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Had they thought for a minute that things might turn out the way they did they never would have had the courage to begin.
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Ann Patchett |
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2c4809d
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All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn't listen to, won't remember, never got right, wasn't around for.
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Ann Patchett |
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acba370
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Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.
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Ann Patchett |
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5b2ab36
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I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
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Ann Patchett |
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6174363
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lunchtime. She waited for a minute for Mr. Fox to say what he had come to say. She didn't think he had come all the way from his office in the snow, a good ten buildings away, to give her a weather report, but he only stood there in the frame of the open door, unable either to enter the room or step out of it. "Are you all right?" "Eckman's dead," he managed to say before his voice broke, and then with no more explanation he gave her the le..
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Ann Patchett |
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6e8e0ee
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All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn't listen to, won't remember, never get right, wasn't around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.
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Ann Patchett |
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401b7e3
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But for this--" She stopped herself. He didn't know. "Where is he now?" Marina asked. She could not bring herself to say his body. Anders was not a body. Vogel was full of doctors, doctors working, doctors in their offices drinking coffee. The cabinets and storage rooms and desk drawers were full of drugs, pills of every conceivable stripe. They were a pharmaceutical company; what they didn't have they figured out how to make. Surely if the..
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Ann Patchett |
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4a542fe
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The doors sealed them in with the music and sealed the world out and suddenly it was clear that building an opera house was a basic act of human survival. It kept them all from rotting in the unendurable heat. It saved their souls in ways those murdering Christian missionaries could never have envisioned.
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Ann Patchett |
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61b2250
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I do not believe that there were more happy marriages before divorce became socially acceptable, that people tried harder, got through their rough times, and were better off. I believe that more people suffered.
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Ann Patchett |
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41034b5
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Even if you have it all together you can't know where you're going to end up. There are too many forces, as deep and invisible as tides, that keep us bouncing into places where we never thought we'd wind up. Sometimes the best we can hope for is to be graceful and brave in the face of all of the changes that will surely come. It also helps to have a sense of humor about your own fate, to not think that you alone are blessed when good fortun..
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Ann Patchett |
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a61c36c
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IT TAKES A certain amount of effort to be miserable and another kind of effort to be happy, and I was willing to do the work of happiness. I figured even if I couldn't make Lucy deeply happy, I could very likely make her cheaply and immediately happy. I could provide the kind of happiness that would seem hollow if we had had the money or the time to stay in it too long. It was the same as carrying her. I couldn't do it forever, but I could ..
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Ann Patchett |
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7dc1782
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But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.
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Ann Patchett |
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148b726
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I carried him around for years, but one day, I don't know, I put him down. I didn't dream about him anymore. I didn't think what he'd want for lunch every time I got lunch, I didn't look at the guy riding next to me in the car and think about who he wasn't. I felt guilty about that but I have to tell you, it was a relief.
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Ann Patchett |
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adddb6d
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In the absence of language, she believed that he agreed with her completely.
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Ann Patchett |
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82ca9ac
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He could see in his face a love so obviously displayed that she must already know everything there was to know about it. He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together. It was with the smallest step forward that his face was in her hair and then her arms were around his back and they were holding each other. It seemed so simple to g..
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desire
gen
love
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Ann Patchett |
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f891871
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It was not as natural as it appeared. It was more like milking a cow, easy as long as someone else was doing it.
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funny
inspiration
judgments
just-do-it
random
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Ann Patchett |
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61037ce
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Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand.
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class
classroom
questioning
questions
teach
teacher
teacher-quotes
teaching
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Ann Patchett |
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609c3dc
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Had the accompanist played so well? It would have been impossible to remember, his talent was to be invisible, to lift the soprano up, but now the people in the living room of the vice-presidential mansion listened to Kato with hunger and nothing in their lives had ever fed them so well.
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Ann Patchett |
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4ae8a26
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We can take the life apart. We do it all the time." The veins on Alan Saturn's temples were pressing forward with their new influx of blood. "Picasso put his cigarettes out on his girlfriends and we don't love the paintings any less for it. Wagner was a fascist and I can hum you every bar in the opening of Die Walkure."
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Ann Patchett |
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3bba400
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I'll tell you the truth, Dr. Singh, what I have discovered about these trees is not what I expected. It will not be what your pharmaceutical company expects. It is something much greater, much more ambitious than anything we had hoped for. That was Dr. Rapp's great lesson in the Amazon, in science: Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
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Ann Patchett |
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a9cda60
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Wearing shoes in the house was barbaric. There was almost as much indignity in wearing shoes in the house as there was in being kidnapped.
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Ann Patchett |
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ad9f727
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And what I think is that this belief I had was what ruined everything. That's the thing that kept me from going out and finding him, this idea that when he was ready he was going to come and find me. That's the thing I've lost, that excitement, the nervousness I had from waiting. So just when I stopped waiting, that's when you came.
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Ann Patchett |
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0d6074a
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Why is it that we understand that playing the cello will require work but we relegate writing to the magic of inspiration?
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Ann Patchett |
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6e6d827
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Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this, because it is the key to making art and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.
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happiness
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Ann Patchett |
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9dac720
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But in that way life works, once I was off the hook it was easy to make the decision to go.
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Ann Patchett |
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6daf366
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I've always been a believer in repression.
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Ann Patchett |