This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage Quotes

“People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappoint them, or if they do, the owners manage to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen, but it is always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent, it doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on...These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, "How far would you go for me?" you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, "Farther than you would ever have thought was possible.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what they wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren't other people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“received a gift—it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. “Does your husband make you a better person?” Edra asked. There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about. “Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?” she said, running down her list. “Does he make you better?” “That’s not the question,” I said. “It’s so much more complicated than that.” “It’s not more complicated than that,”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Being a childless woman of childbearing age, I am a walking target for people’s concerned analysis. No one looks at a single man with a Labrador retriever and says, “Will you look at the way he throws the tennis ball to that dog? Now there’s a guy who wants to have a son.” A dog, after all, is man’s best friend, a comrade, a pal. But give a dog to a woman and people will say she is sublimating. If she says that she, in fact, doesn’t want children, they will nod understandingly and say, “You just wait.” For the record, I do not speak to my dog in baby talk, nor when calling her do I say, “Come to Mama.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“... the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Sometimes you don’t realize what’s lacking in life until you find it.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“but over time people break apart, no matter how enormous the love they feel for one another is, and it is through the breaking and the reconciliation, the love and the doubting of love, the judgment and then the coming together again, that we find our own identity and define our relationships.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“The ability to have a friend, and to be a friend, is not unlike the ability to learn. Both are rooted in being accepting and open-minded with a talent for hard-work. If you are willing to stretch yourself, to risk yourself, if you are willing to love and honor and cherish the people who are important to you until one of you dies, then there will be great heartaches and even greater rewards.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“We are, on this earth, so incredibly small, in the history of time, in the crowd of the world, we are practically invisible, not even a dot, and yet we have each other to hold on to. When we do things differently, and very often we do, I remind myself that it is rarely a matter of right and wrong. We are simply two adults who grew up in different houses far away from one another.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It's not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“The impressions we pick up as children, when our minds are still open to influence and as soft as damp sponges, are likely to stay with us the longest.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Based on my own experience, I believe the brain is as soft and malleable as bread dough when we’re young. I am grateful for every class trip to the symphony I went on and curse any night I was allowed to watch The Brady Bunch, because all of it stuck. Conversely, I am now capable of forgetting entire novels that I’ve read, and I’ve been influenced not at all by books I passionately love and would kill to be influenced by. Think about this before you let your child have an iPad.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“I was still in high school when I decided I didn't want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my mind.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“I changed along with it. Anything I thought I couldn’t do turned out to be something I managed fine.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage