Quote

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Like
Language
Native
Moderately
Living
Speaking
Lucy
Speak
Suddenly
Nuance
Felt
Realized
Speaker
Another
Whenever
Speakers
Wells
English
Showed
Well
Saws
Hadn
Country
Gone
Complexity

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.
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But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.
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Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.
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If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.
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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.
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I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.
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Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
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I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.
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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.
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You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature.
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Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
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Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.
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I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.
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Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.
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I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels more noble.
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I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.
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Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
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It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
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I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.
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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.
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