Notes: This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Essays by Ann Patchett.

What comes across is her loyalty, her dedication to the craft of writing, to her grandmother, to her dog, and her husband. In that order.

"The Getaway Car"

• Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration? Chances are, any child who stays with an instrument for more than two weeks has some adult making her practice, and any child who sticks with it longer than that does so because she understands that practice makes her play better and that there is a deep, soul-satisfying pleasure in improvement. 
• Art stands on the shoulder of craft. To get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day. 
• Playing the cello, we're more likely to realize that the pleasure is the practice, the ability to create this beautiful sound. ... taught me how to love the practice, and how to write in a quantity that would allow me to figure out for myself what i was actually good at. I got better at closing the gap between my hand and my head by clocking in the hours, stacking up the pages. 
• Somewhere in all my years of practice, I arrived at the art. 
• Collected Stories by Grace Paley.
• Magic Mountain, Mann, and Humboldt's Gift, Bellow. Stories by Delmore Schwartz. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. 
• I wrote because it was my joy. The novel was going to be my getaway car. (ticket out of the ghetto). 
• Novel writing, i soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea. I made a pledge that I wouldn't start the sexy new novel i imagined until I had finished the tired old warhorse I was dragging myself through at present. 
• The part of my brain that makes art and the part that judges that art had to be separated. While I was writing I was not allowed to judge. That was the law. 
• Over the years I've come to realize that I write the book I want to read, the one I can't find anywhere. 
• If you wind up boring yourself, you're going to bore your reader. Keep several plots going at once. 
• Raymond Chandler, Long Goodbye. 
• You must let the action progress the way it must, not the way you want it to. The writer cannot go against the tide of logic he himself has established. 
• Novel. Make it hard, difficult. 
• Writer's block is a myth. Procrastination is not. We are responsible for procrastination. 
• She was worried she had only one story to tell. Really the work of just about any writer you can think of can be boiled down to one story. 
• Habits stick, both the good ones and the bad. Time applied equaled work completed. 

"Tennessee"

• I've been told that the secret to making money, big money, is to find the place on the edge of town where the real estate stops being priced by the square foot and begins to be priced by the acre. Wait for the town to creep to you, convert the acres into square feet. 

"Fact vs. Fiction"

• Making art was much more important to her than making an accurate record of fact. 
• I might not have experienced what happened, I had felt the emotions. 

"This is the story of a Happy Marriage"

• Does he make you better and do you make him better?
• Because tomorrow just keeps on being tomorrow. It's never today. 

"The Mercies"

• What we were told repeatedly was to listen: God had a vocation for all of us and if we paid close attention and were true to ourselves we would know His intention. 
• Happiness is her mind-set, her decision, and though she often reminds me that God will take care of things, she is also determined not to trouble Him if at all possible.