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Book: Truth and Beauty
Quotes of Book: Truth and Beauty
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  1. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    I've always been a believer in repression.
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  2. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    But in that way life works, once I was off the hook it was easy to make the decision to go.
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  3. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    IT TAKES A certain amount of effort to be miserable and another kind of effort to be happy, and I was willing to do the work of happiness. I figured even if I couldn't make Lucy deeply happy, I could very likely make her cheaply and immediately happy. I could provide the kind of happiness that would seem hollow if we had had the money or the time to stay in it too long. It was the same as carrying her. I couldn't do it forever, but I could do it for a while. I booked Lucy a massage and had her eyelashes dyed. I took her for a pedicure. I bought her the best pâté I could find in Nashville along with Spaghetti-O's and Hungry Jack biscuits and everything else I knew she liked. We went to a bad movie and then stayed for a second bad movie. I took her shopping and bought her whatever she wanted. And she was happy, and I was happy.
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  4. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    It's like a big circle. I've gone on a get-a-man crusade, but so far it's been a disaster and I'm feeling as bad about myself as I ever have. I know I'm a great person and all that, a good friend, but I feel like real bottom of the barrel girlfriend material.
    book-quoteself-worth

  5. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    When Lucy believed that there were actually things in the world that were worse than what had happened to her, she could pull herself up on this knowledge like a rope. When she lost sight of it, she sank.
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  6. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    She ate from my plates and wore my clothes and slept in my bed like Goldilocks while the benevolent, lumbering bear went south for the holidays.
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  7. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    Lucy was invisible, exuberant, and utterly birdlike in her wild, darting freedom.
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  8. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    We set off walking backwards, thumbs out, trying to hitchhike to the postoperative breast augmentation appointment, perhaps a first in the state of Iowa.
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  9. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    It was my own special brand of insanity that made me think the trials of Lucy's life could somehow be eased by the order of Tupperware.
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  10. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    In our friendship I had spent a lot of time telling Lucy to pull herself up, to get over the past and move on. That was my role, the best of my Catholic education in action, and I didn't worry about it because I knew that she had other friends, friends who were as close to her as I was, who were more tender. She had practical friends and emotional friends, friends with big houses to crash in and friends who were good for wild fun, and she knit us together to find the perfect balance of what she needed from all of us.
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  11. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    The gawk was full of brazen curiousity, pity, and fear, every unattractive human emotion rolled into one unflattering facial expression.
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  12. Ann Patchett _ Truth and Beauty

    Does this raise or lower, then, the everyday importance of art? Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape? {excerpted letter from Lucy Grealy}"
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