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adbca45
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Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. 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.
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Ann Patchett |
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c46c51c
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This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out.
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Ann Patchett |
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39d7641
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People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can't pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.
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Ann Patchett |
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66e3431
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Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.
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writing
imagination
heartbreak
trade-in
disappointment
writers
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Ann Patchett |
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2eba293
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Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
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Ann Patchett |
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936e112
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it was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected,
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voyeurism
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Ann Patchett |
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e98c336
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When you think of love you think as an American. You must think like a Russian. It is a more expansive view.' 'Americans havea bad habbit of thinking like Americans,' Roxane said kindly.
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Ann Patchett |
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b21a62c
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The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.
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Ann Patchett |
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5aa848f
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And there it went, the burden of her lifetime, taken.
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Ann Patchett |
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de7b95f
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Sometimes not having any idea where we're going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
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Ann Patchett |
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83cacf3
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Minnesota! It smelled like raspberries and sunlight and tender grass. It was summer and everything was more beautiful than any picture she had carried with her....There had never been a place in the world as beautiful as Minnesota.
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Ann Patchett |
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8a50eff
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What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.
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Ann Patchett |
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5d7e179
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as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.
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waiting
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Ann Patchett |
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467868d
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Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.
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russians
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Ann Patchett |
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4643f11
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The ability to have a friend, and to be a friend, is not unlike the ability to learn. Both are rooted in being accepting and open-minded with a talent for hard-work. If you are willing to stretch yourself, to risk yourself, if you are willing to love and honor and cherish the people who are important to you until one of you dies, then there will be great heartaches and even greater rewards.
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Ann Patchett |
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f938319
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It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we mght have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
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Ann Patchett |
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a7c7135
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He had lived his life as a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy. A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost. He knew that one by one each of his daughter would be lost, either honorably in the ceremony of marriage or, realistically, in a car pointed out towards the ocean well after dark. In his day, Oscar himself had made too many girls forget their better ..
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Ann Patchett |
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0165fbc
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You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.
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Ann Patchett |
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dce8ee4
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I could have had one life but insteads I had another because of this book my grandmother protected. What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later that extended to the opera, to the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that I attribut..
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Ann Patchett |
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af85d76
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Well, you can't tell it from looking at him....It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
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Ann Patchett |
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b0ebaac
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but over time people break apart, no matter how enormous the love they feel for one another is, and it is through the breaking and the reconciliation, the love and the doubting of love, the judgment and then the coming together again, that we find our own identity and define our relationships.
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Ann Patchett |
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6b948ba
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Only now, as I'm typing this, have I realized the only thing I wasn't thinking of was how lonely I was. I guess I was my old self for awhile there, my better self. Lately I've been completely obsessed by my loneliness: it colors (note I didn't say colours) everything I see these past few weeks. It's okay to be lonely, I know that, but I don't like the way it's become the thing by which I measure everything else. I can't seem to try to not b..
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Ann Patchett |
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4e8917b
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The impressions we pick up as children, when our minds are still open to influence and as soft as damp sponges, are likely to stay with us the longest.
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Ann Patchett |
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3976eed
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The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write--and many of the people who do write--get lost.
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Ann Patchett |
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d3a28a9
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People souldn't be allowed to decide that they wished to remain a hostage
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Ann Patchett |
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942f6fa
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Never be so focused on what you are looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
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Ann Patchett |
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6c4ddbc
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No one could see her objectively anyway. Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing. Found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and so poured like light though her skin. Then all that could be seen was the weight and the gloss of her hair and the pale pink of her cheeks and her beautiful hands.
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Ann Patchett |
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1b783ca
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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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Ann Patchett |
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154787d
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Your mom doesn't know about the movie, does she?" "My mom doesn't know about the book," he said, "It turns out a novel isn't the worst place to hide things."
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Ann Patchett |
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304593e
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We are, on this earth, so incredibly small, in the history of time, in the crowd of the world, we are practically invisible, not even a dot, and yet we have each other to hold on to. When we do things differently, and very often we do, I remind myself that it is rarely a matter of right and wrong. We are simply two adults who grew up in different houses far away from one another.
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Ann Patchett |
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e99a5d1
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It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they'd wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness. The
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Ann Patchett |
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dd91971
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I do not remember our love unfolding, that we got to know one another and in time became friends. I only remember that she came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first.
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Ann Patchett |
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5bc0ebb
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People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can't teach you how to have something to say.
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Ann Patchett |
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bfa5f94
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As if music were a separate thing you could drive yourself into, make love to, fuck.
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Ann Patchett |
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bb69c52
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Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don't have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don't understand, then I don't have the time to explain it to you. If you don't have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.
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timidity
teaching
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Ann Patchett |
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61fef69
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I see the past as it actually was," Maeve said. She was looking at the trees. "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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0be8d77
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Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It's not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.
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novel
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Ann Patchett |
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49a3f62
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The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived. That is how one respects indigenous people. If you pay any attention at all you'll realize that you could never convert them to your way of life anyway. They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned. You might as well come down here to unbend the r..
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Ann Patchett |
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95424ad
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Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone, like going to the movies by yourself in the afternoon or, back in those golden days of youth, having a cigarette in the bathtub. It is a pleasure to not have to take anyone else's tastes into account or explain why I like to drink my grapefruit juice out of the carton. Eating, after all, is a matter of taste, and taste cannot always be good taste. The ve..
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Ann Patchett |
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e4f81c6
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Instead, he was astonished by what he had: the chance to sit beside this woman in the late afternoon light while she read.
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Ann Patchett |
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c0f91eb
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She was his wife in every way that mattered and that would save her.
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Ann Patchett |
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6cea56b
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When did the mammals get confusing? Who can't look at a baby and a puppy and see the differences? You can't leave babies at home alone with a chew toy when you go to the movies. Babies will not shimmy under the covers to sleep on your feet when you're cold. Babies, for all their many unarguable charms, will not run with you in the park, or wait by the door for your return, and, as far as I can tell, they know absolutely nothing of unconditi..
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Ann Patchett |
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0e424d9
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Time could barely pull the second hand forward on the clock...
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Ann Patchett |
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0549f9d
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In the future, he will try to say her name enough, but he never can.
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name
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Ann Patchett |