Quote

I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Tables
Wait
Skills
Teaching
Food
Restaurant
Teach
Cook
Waiting
Restaurants
Two
Cooks

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When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
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Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.
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Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.
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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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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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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.
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I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.
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He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.
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It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
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I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.
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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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Fiction is always really a labor.
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If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.
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He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!
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No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do
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I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.
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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 love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.
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I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.
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I always used to be an inside person, and now I'm an outside person.
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