Ann Patchett Quotes

I don't always know what I want to hear, but I'm gonna try and pull it out and sing it to you, and if you hear it the way I sing it to you, then a wall is broken.

Don't forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: 'Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain't coming across to me?' It is to be shared.

Fear is the great enemy of intimacy. Fear makes us run away from each other or cling to each other but does not create true intimacy.

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

If I loved all the world as I do you, I shouldn't write books to it: I should only write letters to it, and that would be only a clumsy stage on the way to entire telepathy.

Love without conversation is impossible.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

I like to see people's eyes when I'm singing to them.

You've got a song you're singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you've got to make them think that you're one of them sitting out there with them too. They've got to be able to relate to what you're doing.

If I cannot understand my friend's silence, I will never get to understand his words.

People have allowed me into their homes, through my words and my music.

Communication is so much better when people are vulnerable.

It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.

What I say is from my heart. You must be sincere. So when I sing a song, people are supposed to feel it.

Every Hispanic player goes through that. It's a lot of hard work, to be able to communicate with your teammates. English is fundamental to be able to express yourself fully in a game.

I really enjoy being vulnerable, and it's how I connect with other people, and part of how I do that is through food, by sharing something that I feel is very intimate and personal because it's something that I create out of nothing.

You don't always have to have the most amazing story. It's learning to share the story you have that counts.

You speak to be understood, right? And you're understood so you can be felt. And you're felt so you can get what you want.

I try to make really close bonds with people.

People come to the theatre in search of a real encounter with other human beings, and we must give them what they come for. Our capacity to do that is the measure of being human. And if the price is that we sometimes say something not very pleasant - well, that's precisely why people want us, in the end: because we speak the truth.

I want to be a voice people listen to and feel good or sad or whatever.

I've never been one of those to kind of like, 'I want somebody to do something against their nature to titillate me.' That never holds any interest. And I always want people to be who they are and if they're being not who they are I feel like it's false and, therefore, less easy to connect to. I don't need them to kiss or to display physical intimacy. I think that almost becomes too obvious. I love playing in the suggestive.