Ann Patchett Quotes

...was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...

Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.""They're free," Franny said. "I check them out of the library.""Well, thank God for libraries," Caroline said.

Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that God's own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting, warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God in heaven. It was a miracle and he wept for the gift of bearing witness.

Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.

They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them.

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.