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2a4df8e
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They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them.
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waiting
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Ann Patchett |
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9567c5e
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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. All the ways to get to Torrance.
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Ann Patchett |
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77251f0
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The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times.
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Ann Patchett |
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90ee010
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The part when they are together for a while, the two of them, before things go wrong. The way things ended always obliterated the genuine happiness that had come before and that shouldn't be the case.
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Ann Patchett |
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8d24b11
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Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not unlike seeing tigers at the zoo.
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Ann Patchett |
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265ceb8
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But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.
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Ann Patchett |
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9a385d4
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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.
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Ann Patchett |
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50b2fba
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It's a wonderful thing to find a great teacher, but you also have to find him or her at a time in life when you're able to listen to, trust, and implement the lessons you receive.
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Ann Patchett |
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bf7af72
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They were her kidnappers, sailing her across the lawn and into the backseat of the car, lifting up her feet while pivoting her around in a way that was disturbingly professional, as if stealing old people was what they did.
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Ann Patchett |
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0568c20
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The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She was, in a sense, sitting at a craps table with her last stack of chips, trying again and again to hit it big.
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Ann Patchett |
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3b9cffe
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Gen, with his genius for languages, was often at a loss for what to say when left with only his own words.
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Ann Patchett |
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ce08c16
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We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides.
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Ann Patchett |
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a13eebc
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I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it.
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Ann Patchett |
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52c2e1c
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Certain things existed out of time. It was ten years ago, it was this morning. 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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9dfc7ff
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I was still in high school when I decided I didn't want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my mind.
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Ann Patchett |
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59fba03
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Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.
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Ann Patchett |
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33a3bbc
|
A pain exploded up high in her chest and spit her out of this terrible world.
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Ann Patchett |
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def5172
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I wrote the last sentence of in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in my life as a writer to match that moment, the blue of the sky and the breeze drifting in from the bay. I had done the thing I had always wanted to do: I had written a book, all the way to the end. Even if it proved to be terrible, it was mine.
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writing-process
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Ann Patchett |
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a7892d7
|
You don't find strangers declaring themselves to you awkward?' But then she wouldn't, would she? People must fall in love with her hourly. She must keep a staff of translators to interpret the proposals of love and marriage. 'It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying,' Roxane said.
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Ann Patchett |
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09dbc5f
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They had wanted to go to the barn and brush the horses. If they brushed the horses and mucked out a few of the stalls then usually Ned would let them take turns riding the mare for the afternoon. But Albie was driving them crazy. What was he doing that was so intolerable? Standing here in front of him now, Franny couldn't remember. Or maybe he wasn't doing anything wrong. Maybe it was just that someone had to watch him around the horses and..
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Ann Patchett |
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9e92e62
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He looked around the house and declared the entire situation straight-up Fitzgerald, so much so that sleeping over would have to be part of it. Astrid,
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Ann Patchett |
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3ce683e
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His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were old enough to be members of a terrorist organization
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Ann Patchett |
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8f1ba2e
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You don't see many shy terrorists.
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Ann Patchett |
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e92762d
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Those were lean years for emotional charity...
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Ann Patchett |
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33307fb
|
She's a nice girl," Tennessee said as a way of saying goodbye to them, as a way of saying thank you and I'm sorry, as a way of saying, I wish I had never let you go and I wish we had never met."
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Ann Patchett |
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96ed7db
|
Sometimes you don't realize what's lacking in life until you find it.
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Ann Patchett |
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5d71a3f
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The sleep he went back to was never the one he left.
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sleep
run
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Ann Patchett |
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5f23f74
|
Your guilt's got nothing on my guilt," Franny said. "Your guilt isn't even in the ballpark."
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Ann Patchett |
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abab100
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Catholicism is an obsessive-compulsive faith.
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obsessive-compulsive-disorder
run
catholicism
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Ann Patchett |
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e8adf65
|
What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it's the closest thing to being God you're ever going to get. All the decisions are yours. You decide when the sun comes up. You decide who gets to fall in love and who gets hit by a car. You have to make all the trees and all the leaves and then sew the leaves onto the trees. You make the entire world.
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Ann Patchett |
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1ee38fb
|
This was her moment, the perfect now.
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Ann Patchett |
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bad8dae
|
Perhaps you are right. In another setting it would be ridiculous, too grand. In another setting it would not happen because you are a famous woman and at best I would shake your famous hand for one second while you stepped into your car after a performance. But in this place I hear you sing every day. In this place I watch you eat your dinner, and what I feel in my heart is love. There is no point in not telling you that. These people who d..
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Ann Patchett |
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633c0dd
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I changed along with it. Anything I thought I couldn't do turned out to be something I managed fine.
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Ann Patchett |
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c947589
|
There are in life a few miraculous moments when the right person is there to tell you what you need to hear and you are still open enough, impressionable enough, to take it in.
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Ann Patchett |
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268d9a1
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was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...
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paris
|
Ann Patchett |
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367f723
|
If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.
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life
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Ann Patchett |
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dff8e8d
|
He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.
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love
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Ann Patchett |
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cfd2d90
|
Her mother was lost in a sea of irregular verbs.
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Ann Patchett |
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5a4f740
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If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day. Try it first with a bird, General Benjamin said gently to Alfredo. Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn't know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.
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Ann Patchett |
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aeb1674
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Based on my own experience, I believe the brain is as soft and malleable as bread dough when we're young. I am grateful for every class trip to the symphony I went on and curse any night I was allowed to watch The Brady Bunch, because all of it stuck. Conversely, I am now capable of forgetting entire novels that I've read, and I've been influenced not at all by books I passionately love and would kill to be influenced by. Think about this b..
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Ann Patchett |
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18aeabf
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Franny and Leo didn't talk about marriage, except sometimes sentimentally in bed, his hands spreading wide across her back, and even then it was only to say how quickly they would have married had it not been for the future and the past.
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Ann Patchett |
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c43a307
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The trouble with good fortune is that people tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and as well for others, we think they must have done something to have brought it on themselves. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, what but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fa..
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poverty
inspirational
inequality
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Ann Patchett |
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15be426
|
She was shocked by how bad he looked. Cancer really was the devil's handshake.
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Ann Patchett |
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4fb96f8
|
I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open.
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Ann Patchett |