Tom Lake

by Ann Patchett

the first time is luxury, the second time privilege.

This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all. It’s about falling so wildly in love with him—the way one will at twenty-four—that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end, nor did it occur to me to care.

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it.

maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.