These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

Time works tirelessly to erase facts—this country works tirelessly—but facts have a way of popping up, their buoyant truth shining all the more brightly with time.

Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.

Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women. I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.

“All you have to do,” he tells me, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.

The trick is in the decision to wake up every morning and meet the world again with love.

I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be.

Influence is a combination of circumstance and luck: what we are shown and what we stumble upon in those brief years when our hearts and minds are fully open.

The Cirrus lacked the guy factor, but was the safest and most reliable plane on the market—the Toyota Corolla of aviation.

For as many times as the horrible thing happens, a thousand times in every day the horrible thing passes us