Ann Patchett

“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.”

“What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.”

“Every drop of rain hit the ground with such force it bounced back up again, giving the earth the appearance of something boiling.”

“Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.”

“Marina Singh: "You went to Radcliffe."Annick Swenson: "I didn't love it.”

“He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.”

“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 tenacity. But what I quickly learned was that their tenacity was for going, not for staying. Once they were out on the trail they fell like flies. Some took a day, two days, others were gone in a matter of hours, and Dr. Rapp never stopped for them. He remained beautifully consistent: he was to work and he would continue to work. He would not ferry back the weak and the lame. They had chosen to get themselves in and they would simply have to figure the means to get themselves out. People were quick to accept these terms until they themselves were weak. Then they changed their tune entirely, then they said Dr. Rapp was heartless. They couldn't slander him as a scientist but they said no end of scurrilous things about him as a man. He hadn't rescued them! He hadn't been their father and mother! I will tell you, none of that troubled his sleep. If he had made them his responsibility, either by dissuading them from their ambitions or by bailing them out of their folly, the greatest botanist of our time would have been reduced to a babysitter. It would have been an incalculable blow to science, all in the name of saving the stupid.”

“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.”

“One must not be shy where language is concerned.”

“I will write my way into another life.”

“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.”

“Never be so focused on what you are looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”

“The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.”

“The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.”

“Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.”

“It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. 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.”

“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.”

“She's growing up," Sister Evangeline said.And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same.”

“The part when they are together for a while, the two of them, before things go wrong. The way things ended always obliterated the genuine happiness that had come before and that shouldn't be the case.”

“There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.”

“No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.”

“...writing stories was always a bit like falling in love with a stranger and running off to Marrakech for a long weekend. It didn't have to be successful to be thrilling.”

“...that it was so completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else.”

“Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.”

“They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them.”

“He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.”

“...it was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected,”

“In the future, he will try to say her name enough, but he never can.”

“As if music were a separate thing you could drive yourself into, make love to, fuck.”

“Most of the time we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are.”

“It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.”

“I don't have any talent for vacations.”

“Time could barely pull the second hand forward on the clock...”

“...as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.”

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

“If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.”

“...was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...”

“If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.”

“We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides.”

“It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.”

“Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.”

“Minnesota! It smelled like raspberries and sunlight and tender grass. It was summer, and everything was more beautiful than any picture she had carried with her.”

“...And there it went, the burden of her lifetime, taken.”

“When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”

“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.”

“The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.”

“Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.”