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1 " Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. "
― Ann Patchett , State of Wonder
2 " It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement. "
3 " There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it. "
4 " One must not be shy where language is concerned. "
5 " Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don't have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don't understand, then I don't have the time to explain it to you. If you don't have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear. "
6 " Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find. "
7 " In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant. "
8 " Everyone knows everything eventually. "
9 " He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it. "
10 " No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth. "
11 " She understood in life that a person was only allowed one trip down to hell. "
12 " Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. "
13 " But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do. "
14 " Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right. "
15 " Like her mother and all her mother's people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry night. Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth. "
16 " Every drop of rain hit the ground with such force it bounced back up again, giving the earth the appearance of something boiling. "
17 " ...And there it went, the burden of her lifetime, taken. "
18 " Minnesota! It smelled like raspberries and sunlight and tender grass. It was summer and everything was more beautiful than any picture she had carried with her....There had never been a place in the world as beautiful as Minnesota. "
19 " You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them. "
20 " Never be so focused on what you are looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find. "
