Tom Lake Quotes

“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. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“What was it like?” she asks me again. It was like being a leaf in a river. I fell in and was carried along.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Days are endless and the weeks fly by.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Sapphire sky, diamond clouds, emerald leaves, ruby cherries. The magic with which Nell understands overwhelms me at times.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“You can’t pretend this [Covid] isn’t happening,” Maisie said. I couldn’t, and I don’t. Nor do I pretend that all of us being together doesn’t fill me with joy. I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Work for the good of the collective, root for the team, get over yourself.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Maisie’s phone rings. The house rule is no phones at the table but we’ve made an exception for Maisie who keeps getting calls from neighbors asking for help, and we made an exception for Emily so that Benny can text her and tell her what time he’ll be back at the house, and so of course we extended the exception to Nell, because why would we let her sisters answer their phones at the table and make her turn hers off? Joe and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“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.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“We could listen to podcasts until the hour of our death and not make a dent in the stories that are available to us.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“I am fifty-seven. I am twenty-four.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“The number of things I’d failed to grasp back then was as limitless as the stars in the night sky.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Hazel heads up the hill to the cemetery where generations of my husband’s people are buried behind a low iron fence, and for whatever reason I follow the dog. A plush vegetation is knitted over all the graves, and I think of how meticulously Joe’s aunt had kept things here, but this is not the summer for weeding. The cemetery is the highest point on the property and would have been the logical site for a house, the way it overlooks the trees and the barn and all the way to the edge of the lake, but those first settlers gave the best land to their dead, the very first a two-year-old named Mary. One by one they followed her up the hill until twenty-nine of them were resting beneath the mossy slabs, and there they wait for us to join them. That’s what life was like back in the day, you buried your children, your husband, your parents right there on the farm. They had never been anywhere else. They had never wanted to be anywhere else.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake