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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c8e25e5 | 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.. | Ann Patchett | ||
| ed4dce8 | At least she was not a tall woman. She was a pixie, a pocket Venus. | Ann Patchett | ||
| fcc6e11 | 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. | love religion responsibility selflessness | Ann Patchett | |
| 760f556 | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 0378049 | What do the only children do? | Ann Patchett | ||
| 7bbb790 | 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.. | iowa-city iowa-writers-workshop lucy-grealy | Ann Patchett | |
| f5beb67 | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| ea4c6dc | Gen stopped and talked to Simon Thaibault, who was reading One Hundred Years Of Solutide in Spanish. | Ann Patchett Bel Canto | ||
| da68f08 | Without worry to protect me, every thought that came into my mind received real attention. | Ann Patchett | ||
| ca7d55e | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 790e27d | It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him like music. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 6b69467 | 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? | Ann Patchett | ||
| ed3be61 | She's growing up," Sister Evangeline said. And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same." | Ann Patchett | ||
| 5ba8b7f | 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. | singing | Ann Patchett | |
| cfee359 | 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. | desire love | Ann Patchett | |
| d033c64 | that it was so completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 848f10e | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 0d58ffc | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| b7403f0 | We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership. | ideas sweaters writing | Ann Patchett | |
| 627e458 | 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 | Ann Patchett | ||
| 6aa6055 | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 7bb2561 | 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.. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 9a67a8b | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 82d0db2 | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 23b9e62 | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| cdaadf3 | 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." -- | Ann Patchett | ||
| e0a0afe | 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.. | singing voice | Ann Patchett | |
| 4ba8b33 | People made her tired. The way they were easy with one another, the way they seemed so natural, only made her sad. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 3e8fd50 | 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. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 95705e2 | Suzanne said. "And then she goes in the kitchen and makes herself a martini in an iced-tea glass and she thinks I don't know. She eats the olives on the side. By the handful." "Whenever you see her eating olives," Carrie said, "you can be about one hundred percent positive that there's gin in her glass." "What happens when the gin runs low?" I asked. "And the vermouth and olives?" "Well, I go to the liquor store, of course!" Suzanne said. ".. | Dorothea Benton Frank | ||
| 42665e2 | 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?" | Ann Patchett | ||
| 40dc2fd | All four of the boys were frozen, mesmerized, the weirdest chill washing over their skin while they watched this miraculous growing animal devouring the earth in every direction, every direction where there was grass and not bothering them at all on the pavement. The fire came as high as their waists, their chests, gorgeous beyond anything they'd seen, the rippling orange sheets hanging in the air like a desert mirage, like something that w.. | Ann Patchett | ||
| 08781a4 | What you have to remember about your mother is that she didn't have her own character. She turned into whoever she was sitting next to. When | Ann Patchett | ||
| 59209bb | Until then I'll keep writing things down, both the things I make up and the things that have happened. It is the way I've learned to see my life. | Ann Patchett | ||
| f34b701 | No, you don't look at the cigarette, you look at me. When you light a cigarette you have to look the person in the eyes. | Ann Patchett | ||
| bfd243f | I have always believed that the desire for revenge is one of life's great motivators, and my success would be my revenge | Ann Patchett | ||
| 3940669 | I saw it myself. An endless succession of mongrels and malingerers, the laziest dropouts who fancied themselves explorers. He made his policy clear: he was not responsible for their food, their shelter, their safety, or their health. He didn't waste his time discouraging them because frankly there was no discouragement they could not withstand. All of the energy they could have put into their intelligence they had used to develop their tena.. | scathing | Ann Patchett | |
| e34a957 | She was loyal and brave and as smart as a treeful of owls. By explaining her talents and legions of virtues, though, I would not be making my point, which is that the death of my dog hit me harder than the deaths of many people I have known, and this can't be explained away by saying how good she was. She was. But what I was feeling was something else entirely. I came to realize in the months following Rose's death, months that I referred t.. | Ann Patchett | ||
| fb5b6a1 | The root system changes the acidity level in the soil so that nothing much will grow here except for the trees and a little bit of grass. In a sense you could say the tree poisons the area it inhabits to make sure that nothing else will survive in its space and take the nutrients out of the soil or grow taller and block out the sunlight. | Ann Patchett | ||
| d09de2a | He liked to talk about the criminals he had put away, and how a person never knew, and how he had to protect his family, and how he wasn't going to let the other guy make the first move, but really it was just that Bert liked guns. The | Ann Patchett | ||
| de7a2e4 | She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but | Ann Patchett | ||
| e4c8bf6 | The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in the den to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room. | family-dinner | Ann Patchett | |
| fd9f243 | There was no explanation for how the school, which was the major source of misery in their lives, could have been transformed into the most compelling place on earth simply by virtue of its being Saturday. What a difference a day makes, Albie's | Ann Patchett | ||
| d2a5a27 | 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 | Ann Patchett |