Truth and Beauty

by Ann Patchett

My experience only left me smart enough to comprehend my own stunning lack of comprehension.

We had invented time, and we could not kill it fast enough.

Grief isn’t something to ‘be gotten through.’ It has no life of its own like that, it’s just plain and simply there. It’s one of the things which tells us we’re human.

I couldn’t ever remember being lonely before, certainly not in this way, until I had seen the edge of all the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad ways that person could never be there for you.

Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head.

how beautiful it would be to live so far away from my mistakes.

We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.

Maybe writing wouldn’t have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual.

I had spent a lot of my life trying to find quiet time alone, but I had very little experience with being lonely.

She decided to make herself a student of suffering, but it had to be the right kind of suffering to capture her imagination.

shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us.

Telling yourself you shouldn’t be ashamed of something rarely got anyone anywhere.

She was my best friend, and she was lending me the brilliance of her light in a moment when things were looking decidedly dull for me. It was something we did for one another over the years, depending on which of us had more light to share.

Love, in her imagination, was so dazzling, so tender and unconditional, that anything human seemed impossibly thin by comparison.

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.

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 even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.