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7b325fe
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I don't want to wind up some old woman who talks to her rabbit," she said to Rabbit, who was chewing so furiously he didn't even bother to lift his head."
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Ann Patchett |
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4dd63cf
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Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
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Ann Patchett |
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e0c7b81
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Once you decide that strangers are more than just dangerous accidents waiting to happen, you will find yourself able to listen. 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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7f10c1b
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But Lucy had been alone too much of her life, and in her loneliness she had constructed a vision of what a perfect relationship would look like. Love, in her imagination, was so dazzling, so tender and unconditional, that anything human seemed impossibly thin by comparison. Lucy's loneliness was breathtaking in its enormity...she was trapped in a room full of mirrors, and every direction she looked in she saw herself, her face, her loneline..
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Ann Patchett |
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e8398f7
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For a man to know what he has when he has it, that is what makes him a fortunate man. Fyodorov
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Ann Patchett |
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3596dc7
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To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you'd never do it, so if I went back I would never be able to leave again. Now that I knew what leaving meant.
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Ann Patchett |
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7698fa6
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The President's unwavering devotion to his television set was so potentially embarrassing his cabinet would gladly have traded it in for an indiscreet mistress.
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Ann Patchett |
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960308b
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have never subscribed to the notion of "writing what you know," at least not for myself. I don't know enough interesting things."
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Ann Patchett |
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3d04fd7
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whenever possible, you need to go to the primary source to make your decisions. Regardless of whether or not you're a student, it is never enough to rely on other people's ideas. You have to look at the thing itself and make up your own mind. That's what it means to study and to learn. Some secondary sources proclaim their points of view so loudly and with such passion you might be tempted just to take their word for it. You might be tempte..
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Ann Patchett |
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6216c93
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They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.
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Ann Patchett |
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59fe072
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When Teresa was told that she had lost summers, she made a point to curse and weep, but she wondered silently if she hadn't just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation.
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Ann Patchett |
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0f548aa
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Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.
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running
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Ann Patchett |
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d9c0b64
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At home, the puppy Rose played with balls, struggled with the stairs, and slept behind my knees while we watched in adoration. It's not that I was unhappy in what I now think of as "the dogless years," but I suspected things could be better. What I never could have imagined was how much better they would be. Whatever holes I had in my life, in my character, were suddenly filled. I had entered into my first adult relationship of mutual, unco..
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Ann Patchett |
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b781546
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She caught herself then. Such babble! Teresa was shocked by the roaming idleness of her mind, as if she were sifting through trash on the side of the freeway and was stopped, enchanted, by every foil gum wrapper. She came back for a single breath but found herself reflecting on the bean salad they'd had for dinner, some kind of pink beans in there she hadn't seen since childhood. She couldn't remember what they were called. Her mother would..
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Ann Patchett |
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c8e25e5
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In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives. Edith Thibault was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women that often over the co..
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Ann Patchett |
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ed4dce8
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At least she was not a tall woman. She was a pixie, a pocket Venus.
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Ann Patchett |
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fcc6e11
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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.
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responsibility
religion
love
selflessness
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Ann Patchett |
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760f556
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It's like this enormous tree had just crashed through the house and I was picking up the leaves so no one would notice what had happened.
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Ann Patchett |
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0378049
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What do the only children do?
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Ann Patchett |
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7bbb790
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I was never happier than on the nights we stayed home, lying on the living room rug. We talked about classes and poetry and politics and sex. Neither of us were in love with the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but it didn't really matter because we had no place else to go. What we had was the little home we made together, our life in the ugly green duplex. We lived next door to a single mother named Nancy Tate who was generous in all matters. She w..
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iowa-city
iowa-writers-workshop
lucy-grealy
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Ann Patchett |
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f5beb67
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Shy Carmen, always hanging back from the others, who knew she could smile? But at the sight of that smile he would have promised her anything. He was just barely awake. Or maybe he was not awake at all. Had he wanted her and not known it? Had he wanted her so much that he dreamed she was lying beside him now? The things our minds keep from us, Gen thought. The secrets we keep even from ourselves.
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Ann Patchett |
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ea4c6dc
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Gen stopped and talked to Simon Thaibault, who was reading One Hundred Years Of Solutide in Spanish.
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Ann Patchett Bel Canto |
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da68f08
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Without worry to protect me, every thought that came into my mind received real attention.
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Ann Patchett |
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ca7d55e
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After her death, at the age of thirty-nine, I wrote a book about us. I wrote it as a way to memorialize her and mourn her, and as a way of keeping her own important memoir, Autobiography of a Face, alive, even as I had not been able to keep her alive. This was a story of a Herculean effort to endure hardship, and to be a friend. Even when the details of our lives became sordid, it was not the stuff of sewers.
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Ann Patchett |
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790e27d
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It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him like music.
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Ann Patchett |
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6b69467
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They were so taken by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their mouth, drink in. Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned. What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?
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Ann Patchett |
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ed3be61
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She's growing up," Sister Evangeline said. And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same."
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Ann Patchett |
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5ba8b7f
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It was nothing like Roxanne singing, where it seemed that everyone's heart would have to wait until she finished before it could beat again.
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singing
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Ann Patchett |
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cfee359
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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.
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love
desire
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Ann Patchett |
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d033c64
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that it was so completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else.
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Ann Patchett |
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848f10e
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Writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.
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Ann Patchett |
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0d58ffc
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A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air.
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Ann Patchett |
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b7403f0
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We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.
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writing
sweaters
ideas
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Ann Patchett |
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627e458
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If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain. Victor
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Ann Patchett |
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6aa6055
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Marina brushed her hand across the back of her neck and dislodged something with a hard shell. She had learned in time to brush instead of slap as slapping only served to pump the entire contents of the insect, which was doubtlessly already burrowed into the skin with some entomological protuberance, straight into the bloodstream.
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Ann Patchett |
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7bb2561
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These people who detain us so pleasantly may decide to shoot us after all. It is a possibility. And if that is the case, then why should I carry this love with me to the other world? Why not give to you what is yours?" "And what if there is nothing for me to give you?" She seemed to be interested in Fyodorov's argument. He shook his head. "What a thing to say, after all that you have given to me. But it is not about who has given what. Th..
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Ann Patchett |
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9a67a8b
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Must Thibault imagine the animal (who was long since dead but when and how? He couldn't remember) skinned and braised? Milou as dinner. Once something is named it can never be eaten. Once you have called it brother in your mind it should enjoy the freedoms of a brother.
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Ann Patchett |
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82d0db2
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Far outside the city the tree frogs were calling her, and the deep, rhythmic pulse of their voices set the blood flow to her heart.
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Ann Patchett |
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23b9e62
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From his endless work had come a great industry, great personal gain, but happiness? It was a word he would have puzzled over, unable to understand it's importance even while it's meaning was evident.
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Ann Patchett |
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cdaadf3
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They said no, she can't make it. They said everything's closed. And I said you don't know Ann." And then he drifted off to sleep. Explain doubt to me, because at that moment I ceased to understand it. In return I will tell you everything I know about love." --
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Ann Patchett |
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e0a0afe
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Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that God's own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, re..
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singing
voice
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Ann Patchett |
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4ba8b33
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People made her tired. The way they were easy with one another, the way they seemed so natural, only made her sad.
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Ann Patchett |
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3e8fd50
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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. But at seventeen, I didn't understand, and so I left.
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Ann Patchett |
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42665e2
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I received a gift--it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my 25 years of live. "Does your husband make you a better person?"
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Ann Patchett |