For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If youโre lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day youโre alive.
Ann PatchettI used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.
Ann PatchettI could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.
Ann PatchettComing back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.
Ann Patchett