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Ann Patchett
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“My divorce began less than a week before we were married.”
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“There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.”
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“I would like there to be an eighth sacrament: the sacrament of divorce. Like Communion, it is a slim white wafer on the tongue. Like confession, it is forgiveness. Forgiveness is important not so much because we've done wrong as because we feel we need to be forgiven. Family, friends, God, whoever loves us forgives us, takes us in again. They are thrilled by our life, our possibilities, our second chances.”
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“... 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.”
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“... 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.”
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“Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.”
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“Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. ... She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.”
Ann Patchett, U.S. writer
(1963)