Run Quotes

“Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact
God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been before. God was in the folds of his bathrobe, the ache of his knees. God saturated the hallways in the form of a pale electrical light. But now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he should be sensing the afterlife like a sweet scent drifting in from the garden, he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, cling onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he had told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn't see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view. This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given. It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for him. ”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Certain things existed out of time. It was ten years ago, it was this morning. In that way the accident was like his mother's death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different intervals but always there. It happened in the past and it was always happening. It happened every single minute of the day.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Catholicism is an obsessive-compulsive faith.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“The sleep he went back to was never the one he left.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“She's a nice girl," Tennessee said as a way of saying goodbye to them, as a way of saying thank you and I'm sorry, as a way of saying, I wish I had never let you go and I wish we had never met.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“With Tennessee there to visit, Regina Cleri had been bearable to him, and without her he felt like what he was: a useless old man who had been shelved away to die.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“we are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. There comes a time my friends when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, when they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glimmering sunlight of last July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence. He could package the place as hell’s interpretation of the Fountain of Youth and make a fortune: just walk in the door and you’re fifteen all over again.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“She isn’t my mother.” He meant, of course, by simple mathematical extension, that his mother wasn’t Teddy’s mother either. Which meant that Bernadette, for whom he had lit a thousand candles, was the mother to whom his enormous love and devotion had no claim.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“...the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone...”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“All that at present can be said with certainty is that, as with the individual, so with the species, the hour of life has run its course, and is spent,”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“It was a sign of maturity that he could recognize a peaceful moment and decide to let it stand.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“He had always known how to pick children up, how to comfort them without embarrassment, and in return the children found a solace in his skin, his hair. He made them hold their own weight by letting them cling to him.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Why wouldn’t it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view?”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“If he was right and God showed His face to the living then it was the surgeons to whom we should offer our novenas. Let us pray to the ones who keep our tired hearts pumping.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn’t see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in the stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Somewhere along the line Teddy’s love for his mother had become his love for Father Sullivan, and his love for Father Sullivan became his love for God. The three of them were bound into an inextricable knot: the living and the dead and the life everlasting. Each one led him to the other, and any member of the trinity he loved simply increased his love for all three. The question wasn’t did he ever think of his mother. The question was did he ever think of anything else.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in Doyle's living room asking for the statue back.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“better to have done something, to have stood for something great and gotten shot for it than it was to never stand up for anything and die like everybody else.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“There were some people who had the ability to tell other people what was worth wanting,”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“In that way the accident was like his mother's death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different intervals but always there. It happened in the past and it was always happening. It happened every single minute of the day.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view?”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Politicians never mentioned the details of life because of course the details that appealed to one person could repel another, so what you wound up with in the end were a long string of generalities, stirring platitudes that could not buy you supper.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Transcendentalist movement?”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Duty—honor—country,’” he said in the voice of an old white man who’d been battered by war. “‘Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.”
― Ann Patchett, Run

“Neither Doyle nor Sullivan had ever been to visit him at Regina Cleri, and Tip had only come one time and then left after five minutes. To Father Sullivan it was as if this part of his family, these people whom he loved, had all packed up and gone to Africa.”
― Ann Patchett, Run