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The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Learned
Darkest
Knew
Student
Sound
Mostly
Subtitles
Film
Sounds
Bergman
Films
Swedish
Subjects
Converse
Students
Converses
College
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More quotes by Ann Patchett

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Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.
Ann Patchett
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shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
Ann Patchett
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Show kindness whenever possible. Show it to the people in front of you, the people coming up behind you, and the people with whom you are running neck and neck. It will vastly improve the quality of your own life, the lives of others, and the state of the world.
Ann Patchett
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If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, No. That is not where I want to go.
Ann Patchett
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I have seven step-siblings from my mother's second and third marriages. My degree of closeness to my step-siblings varies among the seven but I have a great sense of loyalty to all of them, especially the four from my childhood. If those people needed my help I would be there for them.
Ann Patchett
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You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen.
Ann Patchett
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You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.
Ann Patchett
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The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
Ann Patchett
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My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society.
Ann Patchett
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I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.
Ann Patchett
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I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.
Ann Patchett
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Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.
Ann Patchett
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Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
Ann Patchett
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Fiction is always really a labor.
Ann Patchett
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I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.
Ann Patchett
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It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.
Ann Patchett
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Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.
Ann Patchett
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I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.
Ann Patchett
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Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.
Ann Patchett
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That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.
Ann Patchett