The Magician's Assistant Quotes

“If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“I don’t want to wind up some old woman who talks to her rabbit,” she said to Rabbit, who was chewing so furiously he didn’t even bother to lift his head.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“People made her tired. The way they were easy with one another, the way they seemed so natural, only made her sad.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“When you’re young and you want to have a baby because babies are so cute and everybody else has one, nobody ever takes you aside and explains to you what happens when they grow up. Maybe they all think it’s obvious. I mean, if you know enough about biology to know where babies come from, then you should know that sooner or later they turn into teenagers, but somehow you just don’t ever think about it, then one day, bang, you’ve got these total strangers living with you, these children in adult bodies, and you don’t know who they are. It’s like they somehow ate up those children you had and you loved, and you keep loving these people because you know they’ve got your child locked up in there somewhere.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“I don’t want to wind up some old woman who talks to her rabbit,” she said to Rabbit,”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“For twenty-two years Sabine had told her stories to one person, so that the action and the telling had become inseparable. What was left was half a life, the one where she lived it but had nothing later to give shape to the experience.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“He began the patter, the Ladies-and-gentlemen-I-want-to-welcome-you-to. Dot and Bertie Fetters sat forward in their seats, so thrilled to be entertained that for the moment they forgot that the purpose of their trip was to mourn. But then that was the point of magic, to take people in, make them forget what was real and possible. They were so utterly game that when Sam Spender asked if there was anyone in the audience from out of town, they raised their hands, not knowing that everyone in Los Angeles was from out of town.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“...Nebraska was white, a page as still as fallen snow. It was not crosshatched with roads, overrun with the hard lines of interstate systems. It was a state on which you could make lists, jot down phone numbers, draw pictures.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“We talk plenty and it does no one any good. You can’t make somebody else’s decisions for them,” Dot said wearily. “I’ve spent my whole life trying.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“The things that went into keeping people together and tearing them apart remained largely unknown to the parties immediately involved.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“It was the thing that Sabine believed in, more than passion, more than tradition. Find a man you love who is good to you.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“And what I think is that this belief I had was what ruined everything. That's the thing that kept me from going out and finding him, this idea that when he was ready he was going to come and find me. That's the thing I've lost, that excitement, the nervousness I had from waiting. So just when I stopped waiting, that's when you came.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world’s unhappiness on the advent of calculators.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“The general wisdom around here is if you can’t get it at Wal-Mart, you don’t need it.” Sabine looked up at the brown building, which was itself the size of another parking lot. “I’ve never actually been in one of these.” “Go on,” Kitty said. Sabine shook her head. “I’ve just never had any reason to.” Kitty stubbed out her cigarette and replaced her mitten. “Well, you are in for a treat.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“espaliered”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“love my children,” she said. “No one will tell you otherwise, but just between the two of us I have to say I admire you for not having any. The ways they break your heart, Jesus, and it never stops. I mean it, it simply does not stop.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“Magic was less about surprise than it was about control. You lead them in one direction and then come up behind their backs. They watch you, at every turn they will be suspicious, but you give them decoys. People long to be amazed, even as they fight it. Once you amaze them, you own them.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“Most people can’t be magicians for the same reason they can’t be criminals. They have guilty souls. Deception doesn’t come naturally. They want to be caught.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“Where we are born is the worst kind of crapshoot. Sabine was not entitled to her birth in Israel, to the loving nest of Fairfax. This could have been her house. She could have picked up the bat, felt the coolness of the wood in her hands. And if she had, she would have cut off the past as well, clipped it like an article from the newspaper so that people might see that something was missing but no one would know what it was.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“I love my children,” she said. “No one will tell you otherwise, but just between the two of us I have to say I admire you for not having any. The ways they break your heart, Jesus, and it never stops. I mean it, it simply does not stop.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“Suddenly to have the privilege of wearing your own skin, the headlong rush of love, the loss of the knifepoint of loneliness. That was the true life, the one you would admit to. Why even mention the past? It was not his past. He was a changeling, separated at birth from his own identity.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“She was lifted by him, balanced on the point of the chair. Magic can seem like love.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“Nothing comes in balance, Sabine. Your kids either vanish or they won’t go away. You pray that one daughter will get married and the other one will get divorced, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about either one of them.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“It smelled like a carnival wearing new clothes.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“No such thing as a spoiled bunny. This is an animal who possesses a limitless capacity for affection.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“It seemed like every time they left the country they managed to work in Paris. They had their rituals, la Pomme de Pain for bread, Les Pyrénées for café au lait, a Mont Blanc at Angelina’s when they were feeling reckless. Sabine knows which evenings the Musée D’Orsay isn’t crowded. She knows the hidden sale racks at Au Bon Marché.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“The warm air smelled like popcorn and Coke. It smelled like a carnival wearing new clothes.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant

“She felt a rush of that privacy that comes not from being alone but from being with the one person you are completely comfortable with.”
― Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant