These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

Beneath the glow of the little white lights draped over the ceiling’s crossbeams, my stepfather’s love for my mother and my father’s hatred of her looked remarkably similar.

To be a writer, you have to like your own company.

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

That is, after all, Robin’s superpower: to love the person in front of her as she is, to see all the glorious light inside them and reflect it back, everywhere.

At every turn we believed we were onto something big, the absolute truth of our lives. We were wrong about nearly all of it.