These Precious Days: Essays Ann Patchett

Kindle notes from These Precious Days: Essays Ann Patchett (TY to Nat for turning us on to Ann):

he was honest about everything—which should not be confused with being thoughtful about everything.

he tried to explain Bernoulli’s principle as it relates to air pressure as a means of explaining why the door was trying to open instead of being pushed closed.

I asked him if there was anything else a person needed in order to be a real writer. “Children,” he said. “Children,” I repeated back, though I hadn’t misunderstood him. He nodded solemnly, for now he was imparting his deepest wisdom. “You can’t be a real writer if you don’t have children.” “Why not?” “Because until you have children, you don’t know what it means to love.”*

People want you to want what they want.

The uncertainty, the complete lack of autonomy or control, leaving places you never wanted to leave to go to places you never wanted to go, the fear, the bullying, the helplessness, the awkwardness, the disappointment and shame, the betrayal by your own body. To have a child required the willful forgetting of what childhood was actually like; it required you to turn away from the very real chance that you would do to the person you loved most in the world the exact same thing that was done to you. No. No, thank you.

I was an uncomfortable child, a small adult biding my time.

We don’t deserve anything—not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.

Then, in the distance breaks my wave. / The poet cannot run from life, / For they are life. / We must stand the experience.

Yo-Yo Ma came in one day and played a Bach suite for the twenty people

I’ve often wondered why the people who seem most certain of the existence of God are the ones who want to keep the respirator plugged in.

*Included because it is so utterly, utterly full of shit. (And how it ties to the next quotes.) From the great essay, "There Are No Children Here."