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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 09dbc5f | 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.. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 9e92e62 | 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, | Ann Patchett | ||
| 3ce683e | 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 | Ann Patchett | ||
| 8f1ba2e | You don't see many shy terrorists. | Ann Patchett | ||
| e92762d | Those were lean years for emotional charity... | Ann Patchett | ||
| 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." | Ann Patchett | ||
| 96ed7db | Sometimes you don't realize what's lacking in life until you find it. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 5d71a3f | The sleep he went back to was never the one he left. | run sleep | Ann Patchett | |
| 5f23f74 | Your guilt's got nothing on my guilt," Franny said. "Your guilt isn't even in the ballpark." | Ann Patchett | ||
| abab100 | Catholicism is an obsessive-compulsive faith. | catholicism obsessive-compulsive-disorder run | Ann Patchett | |
| 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 1ee38fb | This was her moment, the perfect now. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 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.. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 633c0dd | I changed along with it. Anything I thought I couldn't do turned out to be something I managed fine. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 268d9a1 | was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women... | paris | Ann Patchett | |
| 367f723 | If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. | life | Ann Patchett | |
| dff8e8d | He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person. | love | Ann Patchett | |
| cfd2d90 | Her mother was lost in a sea of irregular verbs. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 5a4f740 | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| aeb1674 | 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.. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 18aeabf | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| c43a307 | 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.. | inequality inspirational poverty | Ann Patchett | |
| 15be426 | She was shocked by how bad he looked. Cancer really was the devil's handshake. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 7b325fe | 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." | Ann Patchett | ||
| 4dd63cf | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| e0c7b81 | 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? | Ann Patchett | ||
| 7f10c1b | 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.. | Ann Patchett | ||
| bf4f4c0 | And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool. | Günter Grass | ||
| 4311f5a | The way to get a babe to act in a blue movie is you offer her a million dollars. The way to get a dude is you just have to ask him. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 767c761 | If you just worked hard enough. If you just learned enough. Ran fast enough. Everything would turn out right, and your life would amount to something. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 93ef60c | Give me courage. Flash. Give me heart. Flash. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 41790a1 | At the end of the day, your life is just a story. If you don't like the direction it's going, change it. Rewrite it. When you rewrite a sentence, you erase it and start over until you get it right. Yes, it's a little more complicated with a life, but the principle is the same. And remember, don't let anyone ever tell you that your revisions are not the truth. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| eba2216 | Besides. Eternity was going to seem like forever. With the crowds of smiling people smiling at me in the dark, me who spent my life cleaning bathrooms and mowing the lawn, I told myself, why rush anything? I'd backslid before, I'd backslide again. Practice makes perfect. If you could call it that. I figured, a few more sins would help round out my resume. This is the upside of already being eternally damned. I figured, Hell could wait. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| fc77e80 | Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list...Seeing it down in black and white, somehow you're always disappointed in your life expectancy. How little you'll get done. The resume of your future. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 73b191d | The problem with being talented and gifted is sometimes you get too smart. My uncle Henry says the importance of eating a good breakfast is because your brain is still growing. But nobody talks about how, sometimes, your brain can get just too big. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 5468623 | The ice-cold way death can hit you in the noontime of a sunny day just when you'd never expect. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| fe6ab24 | Nobody cared if he lived or died, and the feeling was fucking mutual. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| a56955a | Our purest joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy. The joy you feel when a limousine turns the wrong way down a one-way street. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| 99fe4e0 | There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| a250de7 | Artificial overstimulation seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available. | Chuck Palahniuk | ||
| f923919 | During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside the plastic. It's these same horn-rimmed suicide glasses, the wrangler says, that inspired the look of Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello. All those young hipsters wearing death on their nose. | Chuck Palahniuk |