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c5f9963
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My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That's why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.
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Ann Patchett |
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0300348
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He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence. He could package the place as hell's interpretation of the Fountain of Youth and make a fortune: just walk in the door and you're fifteen all over again.
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Ann Patchett |
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60d37f3
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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.
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Ann Patchett |
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1f63eb2
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What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.
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Ann Patchett |
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8150b60
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When I hear Roxane sing I am still able to think well of the world," Gen said. "This is a world in which she can still sing that music with so much compassion. That's proof of something, isn't it?"
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Ann Patchett |
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8ee72ea
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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. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did.
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Ann Patchett |
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d57bdf3
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He was a very small man, both in stature and girth, who had been chosen as a running mate as much for his size as for his political beliefs. The pervasive thinking in government was that a taller vice president would make the President appear weak, replaceable.
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Ann Patchett |
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f600fa3
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One boy took a peppermint from a woman's satin evening clutch but first held it up discreetly for consent. She moved her head down and back, just a quarter of an inch, and he smiled and slipped off the cellophane.
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Ann Patchett |
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27c4a67
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With Tennessee there to visit, Regina Cleri had been bearable to him, and without her he felt like what he was: a useless old man who had been shelved away to die.
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Ann Patchett |
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b5c7ef0
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At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was going something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all.
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Ann Patchett |
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198af06
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As tight as it had been in the kitchen before they'd left, there were three times as many people crammed in there now, most of them men. Beverly's mother was nowhere in sight and neither was the baby. Beverly was standing at the sink, a butcher's knife in her hand. She was slicing oranges from an enormous pile that was sliding across the counter while the two lawyers from the L.A. County District Attorney's Office, Dick Spencer and Albert C..
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Ann Patchett |
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0818981
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maybe it's working because I'm an author, and maybe it's working because Karen works like life depends on this bookstore, or because we have a particularly brilliant staff, or because Nashville is a city that is particularly sympathetic to all things independent. Maybe we just got lucky. But my luck has made me believe that changing the course of the corporate world is possible. Amazon doesn't get to make all the decisions; the people can m..
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Ann Patchett |
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f713b21
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I have just reread The Age of Innocence. Poor Countess Olenska, so much more alive than everyone in New York. She was better than Newland Archer, to whom she couldn't give herself because she was married. It didn't matter to society that she had been wronged by her husband. They felt her life was over. Thanks to the modern age of divorce, my life is not. I am coming to see that as a blessing and not something to be ashamed of. I am starting..
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Ann Patchett |
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c8d76a9
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but sometimes all the right things are as useless as nothing at all. Life,
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Ann Patchett |
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aeb0be7
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GAWKING IS A LOOK stronger than a stare. The gawk was full of brazen curiosity, pity, and fear, every unattractive human emotion rolled into one unflattering facial expression.
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Ann Patchett |
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2b3fd5a
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Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books." "They're free," Franny said. "I check them out of the library." "Well, thank God for libraries," Caroline said."
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Ann Patchett |
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3e4366e
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Art is not sin. It's not always good. But it is not a sin.
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Ann Patchett |
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a65ed37
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I may at times forget the details of my life but I remember the stories I read.
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Ann Patchett |
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cf42b69
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The great love of his life, after God, lived only in dark vinyl.
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Ann Patchett |
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bc81ceb
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Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
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Ann Patchett |
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04cdfcc
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espaliered
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Ann Patchett |
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dea569f
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the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone...
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lies
truth
run
lie
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Ann Patchett |
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31fc69b
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Marina Singh: "You went to Radcliffe." Annick Swenson: "I didn't love it."
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Ann Patchett |
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9d340fe
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isn't often the past picks up the phone and calls, affording the opportunity to reconsider personal history in a way that could have saved countless thousands of dollars in therapy had I been inclined to go. I
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Ann Patchett |
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0845e0f
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Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
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Ann Patchett |
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d7b0f97
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Inca Cola.
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Ann Patchett |
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fd2c07e
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I don't have any talent for vacations.
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vacation
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Ann Patchett |
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75cd01d
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We both had our first kiss from the same boy in college (a sainted and tender soul who must have made it his business to kiss the girls who would have otherwise graduated unkissed).
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Ann Patchett |
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c5aca81
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The world is full of things we're better off not knowing.
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Ann Patchett |
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4cb9a51
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Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.
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Ann Patchett |
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e6b71ba
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For the guests of Mr. Hosokawa's birthday party, most of the day was spent wandering from window to window, maybe playing a hand of cards or looking at a magazine, as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.
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Ann Patchett |
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f716ee3
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Simon Thibault would never die in a foolish gesture for Edith. On the contrary, he would take every cowardly recourse available to him to ensure that their lives were spent together.
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Ann Patchett |
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2641b03
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What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.
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Ann Patchett |
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b83b0e3
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Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft.
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Ann Patchett |
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06cd102
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In my books, I make up the experiences and the characters, but the emotional life is real. It is my own.
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Ann Patchett |
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44d43a7
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The sound he was making was the sound Cal had made right before he died, that same high-pitched whistling that was, if not the opposite of breathing, at least the very end of breathing. "It's" --
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Ann Patchett |
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7c34663
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I had a mother who left when I was a child. I didn't miss her. Maeve was there, with her red coat and her black hair, standing at the bottom of the stairs, the white marble floor with the little black squares, the snow coming down in glittering sheets in the windows behind her, the windows as wide as a movie screen, the ship in the waves of the grandfather clock rocking the minutes away.
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Ann Patchett |
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dc5f5fe
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For twenty-two years Sabine had told her stories to one person, so that the action and the telling had become inseparable. What was left was half a life, the one where she lived it but had nothing later to give shape to the experience.
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Ann Patchett |
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d97d734
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Cancer really was the devil's handshake.
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Ann Patchett |
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619cbf2
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Do you think it's possible to ever see the past as it actually was?
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Ann Patchett |
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6c6fc7b
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sense trying to make him feel bad about it. She tilted back her glass and went past the gin for a second time. She
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Ann Patchett |
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1434776
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Kitty stopped the cart and put in two three-packs of paper towels. "Sale." Sabine nodded. Was $2.49 a good price? To know if paper towels were a deal this time, you'd have to remember what they cost last time. Sabine could never remember."
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Ann Patchett |
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e23425c
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Forgiveness was at the heart of everything. Because I could not ask, I could not be forgiven.
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Ann Patchett |
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feed6db
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Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I've found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world. (
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Ann Patchett |