Commonwealth Ann Patchett Quotes

Did you ever want to be a writer?” “No,” she said, and she would have told him. “I only wanted to be a reader.

Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself.

Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.

Isn't that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?

He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.

All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All

The three stages of life: youth, middle age, and ‘You’re looking good, Mr. Keating.

There’s no protecting anyone,” Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. “Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.

This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out.

Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job.

Franny gave her sister a tired smile. "Oh, my love," she said. "What do the only children do?" "We'll never have to know," Caroline said.

Her mother was lost in a sea of irregular verbs.

All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn't listen to, won't remember, never got right, wasn't around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.

Those were lean years for emotional charity...

Your guilt’s got nothing on my guilt,” Franny said. “Your guilt isn’t even in the ballpark.

She was shocked by how bad he looked. Cancer really was the devil’s handshake.

Your mom doesn't know about the movie, does she?" "My mom doesn't know about the book," he said, "It turns out a novel isn't the worst place to hide things.

She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but

It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they’d wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness. The

It's like this enormous tree had just crashed through the house and I was picking up the leaves so no one would notice what had happened.

What do the only children do?

Oh, my love,' she said. 'What do the only children do?' 'We'll never have to know.

They were her kidnappers, sailing her across the lawn and into the backseat of the car, lifting up her feet while pivoting her around in a way that was disturbingly professional, as if stealing old people was what they did.

But sooner or later you have to do something. If you think you're going to find one thing that will be perfect for you, you're going to spend your eightieth birthday reading the want ads.

When Teresa was told that she had lost summers, she made a point to curse and weep, but she wondered silently if she hadn't just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation.

Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself. Now

but sometimes all the right things are as useless as nothing at all. Life,

He looked around the house and declared the entire situation straight-up Fitzgerald, so much so that sleeping over would have to be part of it. Astrid,

They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.

Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not unlike seeing tigers at the zoo.

There was no explanation for how the school, which was the major source of misery in their lives, could have been transformed into the most compelling place on earth simply by virtue of its being Saturday. What a difference a day makes, Albie’s

Franny and Leo didn’t talk about marriage, except sometimes sentimentally in bed, his hands spreading wide across her back, and even then it was only to say how quickly they would have married had it not been for the future and the past.

The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.

Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable.

Cancer really was the devil's handshake.

No, you don't look at the cigarette, you look at me. When you light a cigarette you have to look the person in the eyes.

What you have to remember about your mother is that she didn’t have her own character. She turned into whoever she was sitting next to. When

...he had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all.

No one should have so much money that they could own a house like that and then not even bother to live in it.

She did have friends, she had just made a decision to stay home and experiment with dying.

but sometimes all the right things are as useless as nothing at all.

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.

He liked to talk about the criminals he had put away, and how a person never knew, and how he had to protect his family, and how he wasn’t going to let the other guy make the first move, but really it was just that Bert liked guns. The

I was stopped by security guards in four buildings today. I showed my ID, was told I could go up, and then I was stopped by a second guard at the elevator who told me I couldn’t go up.” Fodé nodded with appreciation. “This is most impressive for a white man.

Their relationship, which had been going on five years, was built on admiration and mutual disbelief. After

So was the movie excruciating to watch because nothing was right, or was it excruciating to watch because, impossibly, some things were? Every

The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side.

They watched the snow fall and fall and fall until they thought that they were the ones falling.

For the vast majority of people on this planet, the thing that is going to kill them is already on the inside

The sound he was making was the sound Cal had made right before he died, that same high-pitched whistling that was, if not the opposite of breathing, at least the very end of breathing. “It’s

the story of his day. “Americans love the idea of vaccinating Africans. What could be nicer than a photograph of dusty little Nigerian children lined up for inoculation on the front page of the New York Times? But for their own children the mothers of New York City find vaccinations passé. They say the vaccination is not sufficiently natural, that it could possibly cause something worse than it could prevent. I have spent the day trying to convince women with college educations to vaccinate their children and they argued with me.

It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they’d wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness.

They had wanted to go to the barn and brush the horses. If they brushed the horses and mucked out a few of the stalls then usually Ned would let them take turns riding the mare for the afternoon. But Albie was driving them crazy. What was he doing that was so intolerable? Standing here in front of him now, Franny couldn't remember. Or maybe he wasn't doing anything wrong. Maybe it was just that someone had to watch him around the horses and none of them wanted to do it. He wasn't the monster they told him he was, in fact there wasn't anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.

Franny brushed the snow off her shoulders and made her way to the rented SUV. She had never told that story to Leo. She had meant to but then for some reason she decided to hold it back. Now she understood that at some point far out in the future there would be a night just like tonight, and she would remember this story and know that no one else in the world knew it had happened except Albie. She had needed to keep something for herself.

He'd told her she wouldn't have to do anything but lie on the big down sofa in the front room and read all day, or she could ride her bike to the beach and read.

He wondered if this was what people were doing—were they making dinners with their family, holding babies, recounting days? Was this what life was like for them?   Albie’s

She didn't know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.

Natalie Posen had chosen to bury her husband in Los Angeles, giving her spite the air of the eternal.

What you have to remember about your mother is that she didn’t have her own character. She turned into whoever she was sitting next to.

He patted their heads like drums. He patted them with a beat.

So I’ve come to Chicago to have a drink,” he said. “I’m living in Iowa City for now. Have you ever been to Iowa City?” “I

People simultaneously wanted to kill them, believed that they had almost killed them, and were afraid of being killed by them.

He hadn’t looked at the list, but if she were standing at

sense trying to make him feel bad about it. She tilted back her glass and went past the gin for a second time. She

It’s strange, when you think about all the worry he caused us, that

Sand, waves, beach roses

Lots of firemen got their start setting fires. They learn to set them, then they learn to put them out. Tom

Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job. He

When she came back she gave him a paperback called Commonwealth. “It was a very big deal last year, won the National Book Award, sold through the roof. Do you know it?

Isn’t that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?

it was a wonderful thing to be needed by the person she most admired, to be told she was indispensable. It

He couldn’t help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. “Is

He realized then what he had known from the first minute he saw her, from when she leaned out the kitchen door and called for her husband. This was the start of his life.

Why, she wanted to ask them, with all the empty stools to choose from, would they want to sit so close? She

If you grow corn or trade in pigs or write poetry then you go to Iowa City.” “That’s why I haven’t been.

You don’t look like you should be with me,” he said, falling into the enchantment of the movie they made together. He

There was no embarrassment there, only peace, only enough time left to ask for one more favor, which Franny thought was the deepest difference between women and men. His

If he saw himself as a famous novelist then he would have known she would be there, but if he saw himself as someone she had met in the bar, well, he was right. She

Cancer really was the devil’s handshake.

Here you

The women in the kitchen took turns making a fuss over the baby, acting like it was their job to keep her entertained until the Magi arrived. But the baby wasn't entertained. Her blue eyes were glazed over. She was staring into the middle distance, tired of everything. All this rush to make sandwiches and take in presents for a girl who was not year a year old.

All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never get right, wasn’t around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.

All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.

She has a point,” Cousins said. He never would have stood back here making sandwiches, though he felt he could use a sandwich, that he wanted one, and so he poured himself another drink.

You’re hardly even in the book.” Caroline laughed. “Maybe that’s what irritated me about it. Anyway, if I was going to sue I’d make it a class-action case, get the whole family involved.

The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.

Teresa had once thought her husband to be the handsomest man in the world, when in fact he looked like one of those gargoyles perched on a high corner of Notre Dame that’s meant to scare the devil away.

I still don’t understand this,” Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. “How did he wind up with my life?” “It isn’t your life,” Leo said. “That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s my imagination.

The words “Ask Your Doctor” parked across the top of the screen, as if the advertisers had anticipated everyone turning off the sound. Franny wondered if the drug was for depression, an overactive bladder, thinning hair.

It was like that for the rest of the summer. It was like that every summer the six of them were together. Not that the days were always fun, most of them weren’t, but they did things, real things, and they never got caught.

Because while Leo Posen appeared to be perfectly sober, she would be that he seemed that way regardless of how much he had drunk. Some men were like that. They went from sober to more or less dead without intermediate steps.

Instead of following her original plan to have an abortion, she and Fode had decided to conduct a radical social experiment they called Having the Baby, and because of the outcome of that experiment, she had dropped out of school.

She caught herself then. Such babble! Teresa was shocked by the roaming idleness of her mind, as if she were sifting through trash on the side of the freeway and was stopped, enchanted, by every foil gum wrapper. She came back for a single breath but found herself reflecting on the bean salad they'd had for dinner, some kind of pink beans in there she hadn't seen since childhood. She couldn't remember what they were called. Her mother would ask her to pick through the beans before she soaked them, to look for little rocks, and she would be so meticulous until she lost interest, dumping the unchecked beans on top of the ones she had vetted, ruining everything. Did anyone in her family ever bite down on a rock?

As tight as it had been in the kitchen before they’d left, there were three times as many people crammed in there now, most of them men. Beverly’s mother was nowhere in sight and neither was the baby. Beverly was standing at the sink, a butcher’s knife in her hand. She was slicing oranges from an enormous pile that was sliding across the counter while the two lawyers from the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office, Dick Spencer and Albert Cousins—suit jackets off, ties off, and shirtsleeves rolled up high above the elbow—were twisting the halves of oranges on two metal juicers. Their foreheads were flushed and damp with sweat, their opened collars just beginning to darken, they worked as if the safety of their city relied on the making of orange juice.

Had she done something with her life no one would be asking her to make them cappuccino, and had she done something with her life she would be perfectly happy to make them cappuccino, because it would not be her job. She would make the coffee because she was a gracious and helpful person.

All four of the boys were frozen, mesmerized, the weirdest chill washing over their skin while they watched this miraculous growing animal devouring the earth in every direction, every direction where there was grass and not bothering them at all on the pavement. The fire came as high as their waists, their chests, gorgeous beyond anything they'd seen, the rippling orange sheets hanging in the air like a desert mirage, like something that was there and not there. Black smoke curled above the flames, announcing to the neighborhood this very private thing that Albie had made. Fire! Fire! they'd be calling in the industrial park, even though it was already starting to die out around the edges. The fire needed so much. The boys could see it looking for more grass, anything to keep itself alive. It would have happily burned them up if it meant going for another minute.

Fix’s and Bert’s mutual theory that a consistent practice over so many years would result in a perfect score had not been correct. A perfect score on the LSAT is 180. Caroline Keating came in at 177. She didn’t know where she had lost those three points but she never forgave herself for them.

The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as “the stripper soundtrack”: Boom chicka-boom, boom-boom chicka-boom. When their mother stopped walking the soundtrack stopped. If she took a single step it was accompanied by Albie saying only “boom” in a voice that was weirdly sexual for a six-year-old.

Cal!' Beverly called out over the crowd... But Cal looked back at her as if it were some weird coincidence that his name was Cal and this complete stranger had said something to someone who was also named Cal. He turned away. Jeanette stood just beside her, looking at the strap of her little shoulder bad, staring at it. Had anyone had this child tested?

Just do me a favor first—go find the baby. Find out who has her. If I go out there now everybody’s going to want to start talking and it’ll be midnight before I find her. Take a quick walk around, would you do that? Make sure some drunk didn’t leave her in a chair.” “How will I know it’s your baby?” Cousins asked. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen a baby at the party, and surely with all these Micks there were bound to be plenty of them. “She’s the new one,” Fix said, his voice gone suddenly sharp, like Cousins was an idiot, like this was the reason some guys had to be lawyers rather than cops. “She’s the one in the fancy dress. It’s her party.