These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

“Our capacity for giving is huge.”

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.

I’m pretty much the poster child for how to incorporate the humanities into your life. It is my greatest love, my deepest joy, and all I want to do is share it, to use books and writers to bridge the lonely technological divide we find ourselves stuck in.

But I believe I’ve done more good on behalf of culture by opening Parnassus than I have writing novels. I’ve made a place in my community where everyone is welcome. We have story time and poetry readings and demonstrations from cookbooks.

the social contract between you and a book you love is not complete until you can hand that book to someone else and say, Here, you’re going to love this.

the future is not one thing. So many possibilities can arise as a result of intelligence, education, curiosity, and hard work.

This love had always been there, it would always be there, no matter how I rewrote it or forgot it. I stood inside my gratitude and cried until finally I fell sleep.

Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built. But for all the times people have wanted to tell me their story because they think it would make a wonderful novel, it pretty much never works out. People are not characters, no matter how often we tell them they are; conversations are not dialogue; and the actions of our days don’t add up to a plot.

there is such a crack in my chest that I think I will lie down in the sand and never get up. The same thought flashes around the circle, I can feel the bright needle of sorrow stitching us together,