Quote

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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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Sleep
Afternoon
America
Gifts
Without
Murder
Endure
Brazilians
Brought
Enslavement
South
Europeans
Century
Figured
Imagine
Centuries

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Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.
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That's important to me, to recommend books.
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I am sure every writer has this and probably every newscaster, that people are always coming up to me and saying, my daughter wants to do what you do, my godson, my tennis partner.
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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.
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I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.
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I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
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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.
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He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.
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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.
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Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.
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It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
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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.
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I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.
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You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.
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The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.
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I am a totally public person.
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I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
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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.
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It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular 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.
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I tend to keep my ideas in my head. When I write something down in a notebook it's never centralized. There are too many notebooks floating around, but maybe that's a good thing.
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