|
c22645e
|
Hard work is first and foremost hard, and whether or not it's ultimately rewarding is very rarely the thing you're thinking of at the moment.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
58db86a
|
The general wisdom around here is if you can't get it at Wal-Mart, you don't need it." Sabine looked up at the brown building, which was itself the size of another parking lot. "I've never actually been in one of these." "Go on," Kitty said. Sabine shook her head. "I've just never had any reason to." Kitty stubbed out her cigarette and replaced her mitten. "Well, you are in for a treat."
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
2a852fa
|
I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
815d077
|
It's a wonderful thing to find a great teacher, but we also have to find him or her at a time in life when we're able to listen to and trust and implement the lessons we are given.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
f28c6e8
|
There are rivers, hundreds of them, running underground all the time, and because of this a man can say he is walking on water.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
8e00a55
|
And if we fail at marriage, we are lucky we don't have to fail with the force of our whole life. I would like there to be an eighth sacrament: the sacrament of divorce. Like Communion, it is a slim white wafer on the tongue. Like confession, it is forgiveness. Forgiveness is important not so much because we've done wrong as because we feel we need to be forgiven. Family, friends, God, whoever loves us forgives us, takes us in again. They ar..
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
7b3bfcd
|
It had occurred to him in his life that he had the soul of a machine and was only capable of motion when someone else turned the key.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
addbf18
|
All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
6848f91
|
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, unconditional love."
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
788919f
|
People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappoint them, or if they do, the owners manage to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me. When
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
79d878f
|
The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as "the stripper soundtrack": Boom chicka-boom, boom-boom chicka-boom. When their mother stopped walking the soundtrack stopped. If she took a single step it was accompanied by Albie saying only "boom" in a voice that was weirdly sexual for a six-year-old."
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
547d6ad
|
All I had ever wanted was a dog who would sleep in my lap while I read and lick my neck and bring me the ball to throw eighty-seven times in a row. I thought a dog would be the key to perfect happiness. And I was right. We are perfectly happy. (
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
c67af71
|
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for. (
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
e4b2b50
|
DAs were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit. The
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
4fdf9ac
|
Had I known anything about the elegance of quitting at the right time, I would have made so many people, starting with myself and Dennis, so much happier.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
670202b
|
I imagined that it was possible for people to have talents, great talents, that they never stumbled across in the course of their lives.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
8c90a59
|
In 1954, money was precious; train tickets and operas were unimaginable things. In a different time, such a production would have seemed too complicated for a child, but this was only a handful of years after the war and children then were much more likely to understand a whole host of things that might seem impossible for children now. They
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
09a76b2
|
That's why you can eat cheesecake,' she said, and sighed. 'Because you don't. That's the way it works.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
3c56755
|
It's not more complicated than that," she said. "That's all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?" Look"
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
903e7f4
|
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. What
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
a86b727
|
Field after field after field, and not an inch of space wasted on something as decorative and meaningless as a tree. "You've"
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
168fe1f
|
You could see just a trace of the daughter there, the way she held her shoulders back, the length of her neck. It was a crime what time did to women.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
72f8cbf
|
He hadn't looked at the list, but if she were standing at
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
0d7924f
|
Fix looked at his watch, a Girard-Perregaux, a much nicer watch than a cop might be wearing. It
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
e68cd6c
|
And so I do. When I can't think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
5a8a8b4
|
my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It's not that I want to kill it, but it's the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing--all the color, the light and movement--is gone. What I'm left with is the dry husk of my friend, the b..
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
ac2c640
|
I was young and filled with a degree of self-interest that could rightly be called selfishness. Nothing was more important than the stories we wrote,
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
e3b563b
|
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 before you let your child have an iPad.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
84cafd3
|
But Rose, for all her incalculable wisdom, was still a dog, and we could not reassure her that something really hideous wasn't about to happen. Maybe she did think that, behind the door of examination room number three, an enormous, drooling animal was waiting to chew her up. She vibrated with fear, tucking her head down and her hindquarters in until she was the size of a grapefruit. How could I explain that this was all for the good, that ..
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
03c460d
|
It was a victory for all the girls that they remembered not to scream.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
7c0cf45
|
Ninety percent of what I know about fiction writing I learned that year. Write it out. Tell the truth. Stack up the pages. Learn to write by writing.
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
dbcfe55
|
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. Think of a sink pipe filled with sticky sediment. The only way to get clean water is to force a small ocean through the tap. Most of us are full up with bad stories..
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
d4b3289
|
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. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let's face it, was once a towering tree crowned wi..
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
71b8f58
|
If he saw himself as a famous novelist then he would have known she would be there, but if he saw himself as someone she had met in the bar, well, he was right. She
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
7bef356
|
If you grow corn or trade in pigs or write poetry then you go to Iowa City." "That's why I haven't been."
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
3aa426d
|
Sand, waves, beach roses
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
160d79b
|
You don't look like you should be with me," he said, falling into the enchantment of the movie they made together. He"
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
05c70f3
|
The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as "the stripper soundtrack": When their mother stopped walking the soundtrack stopped. If she took a single step it was accompanied by Albie saying only "boom" in a voice that was weirdly sexual for a six-year-old."
|
|
humour
|
Ann Patchett |
|
cd8ef80
|
Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job. He
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
ea57150
|
When she came back she gave him a paperback called Commonwealth. "It was a very big deal last year, won the National Book Award, sold through the roof. Do you know it?"
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
65d1f78
|
and washing it off in the sink. "Finish up your lunch." "We're starting now?" "Good a"
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
0ebc86f
|
Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself. Now there
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
4f967b1
|
it was a wonderful thing to be needed by the person she most admired, to be told she was indispensable. It
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |
|
56075de
|
He couldn't help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. "Is"
|
|
|
Ann Patchett |