Quotes by Ann Patchett

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly is always the love that is not returned.

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.

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

She didnt know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.

I wanted two girls, she said. You and your sister. I wanted exactly what I had. Other peoples children are too hard

...the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone...

Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. Its not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.

Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?

There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. 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. A kiss, another kiss.

Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you dont have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you dont understand, then I dont have the time to explain it to you. If you dont have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.

Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a visa.

The sleep he went back to was never the one he left.

Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesnt mean we arent telling the truth; weve simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we dont go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. Its the story we shape and improve on, we dont change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear.

Isnt that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?

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.

Shes growing up, Sister Evangeline said.And I wanted to tell her no, Im not. Everything is exactly the same.

We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.