Tom Lake Quotes. Tom Lake Book a New York Times bestseller, is Ann Patchett’s 13th novel, published in 2023 by Harper. Patchett’s writing career began when she was still in college, and spans both fiction and nonfiction. She gained widespread recognition and acclaim with the publication of her fourth novel Bel Canto in 2001, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, and was adapted into a film, starring Julianne Moore, in 2018.
In 2012, Patchett appeared on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her work is known for its compelling representation of small group dynamics, and often focuses on family, using a character-driven approach that quietly probes questions of love, family, and mortality. Patchett is the owner of Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore in Nashville.
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| Tom Lake Quotes |
Tom Lake Quotes
- “We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands.”
- “It’s about falling so wildly in love with him—the way one will at twenty-four—that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end, nor did it occur to me to care.”
- “The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.”
- “Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.”
- “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.”
- “I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires to not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.”
- “There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it.”
- “we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.”
- “Days are endless and the weeks fly by.”
- “I don’t see why you have to give up one for the other,” she says. “You don’t have to,” I tell my daughter. “You want to. You wake up one day and you don’t want the carnival anymore. In fact, you can’t even believe you did that.”
- “I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her.”
- “Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.”
- “I don’t remember ever looking at my mother this way, like I could eat her down to the bone then wipe my bloody mouth on her hair.”
- “Like every other mother in the history of time, I wondered if I would ever be able to love another child as much as I loved her.”
- “When I go down the hall and find Maisie and Nell asleep in their twin beds, I see them both as they are and as they were: grown women and little girls.”
- “The problem with being the only woman in a play in which the three other characters were men and the playwright was a man and the director was a man was that no matter what I said, I sounded petulant, female.”
- “It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days.”
- “Sapphire sky, diamond clouds, emerald leaves, ruby cherries. The magic with which Nell understands overwhelms me at times.”
- “Work for the good of the collective, root for the team, get over yourself.”
- “turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.”
You may also like to read: Tom Lake Book Summary
Top Quotes from Tom Lake Book
- There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it.
- The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else.
- We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands.
- The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.
- I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her.
- Like every other mother in the history of time, I wondered if I would ever be able to love another child as much as I loved her.
- It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days.
- Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.
- People with children are attuned to the inherent sexual possibility of an empty house.
- “my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift.”
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