These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

Contrary to popular belief, love does not need understanding to thrive. My

writing must be separate from editing, and if you try to do both things at the same time, nothing will get done.

This was the practice: I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death.

didn’t need the glasses or the silver, those things that represented who I thought I would be but never became, and I didn’t need the dolls, because they represented who I had been and no longer was. The typewriter, on the other hand, represented both the person I had wanted to be and the person I am.

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

This is why we have to go back, because even as the text stays completely true to the writer’s intention, we readers never cease to change.

She had managed to peel off other people’s expectations in order to see what a life that was entirely her own would look like.

It looked like the natural world.

Ours is a friendship full of elasticity and trust. For

Born on New Year’s Eve, she seemed to exist in a perpetual fizz of golden champagne bubbles.

For me, the pleasure of being a writer came from the fact that writing felt nothing like a job. I

Flexibility was what writers got instead of health insurance.

People want you to want what they want. If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated. If you don’t want the same things, your lack of wanting can, to certain people, come across as judgment.

How do you take care of your internal compass? You don’t listen to anyone who tells you to do something as consequential as having a child. Think about that one for a second.

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.

We don’t deserve anything—not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.

Book covers should entice readers the way roses entice bees—like their survival depends on it.