Ann Patchett - This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2013)

17 Sourced Quotes

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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
If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.

Ann Patchett
If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.

Ann Patchett
People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappointment them, or, if they do, the owners manages 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.

Ann Patchett
The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.

Ann Patchett
Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

Ann Patchett
I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.

Ann Patchett
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.

Ann Patchett
My divorce began less than a week before we were married.

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

Ann Patchett
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

Ann Patchett
Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

Ann Patchett
I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers.

Ann Patchett
I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

Ann Patchett
There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

Ann Patchett
The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.

Ann Patchett
Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

Ann Patchett