Bel Canto

by Ann Patchett

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

It was packed with people, not one of them eating chips or coughing, all of them straining to listen to the voice they had heard only on records and in their dreams.

The dead we can imagine to be anything at all.

She wished she could tap on the glass and wave to him, but it was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected, as if you were a stranger seeing them for the first time.

He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person. Never had he received such kindness. Maybe the private life wasn’t forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.