Julia Nadeane > Julia's Quotes

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don't you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“But together they moved through the world quite easily, two small halves of courage making a brave whole.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Well, you can't tell it from looking at him....It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“No one could see her objectively anyway. Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing. Found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and so poured like light though her skin. Then all that could be seen was the weight and the gloss of her hair and the pale pink of her cheeks and her beautiful hands.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.'
'But the other is better.'
'Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“People souldn't be allowed to decide that they wished to remain a hostage”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Instead, he was astonished by what he had: the chance to sit beside this woman in the late afternoon light while she read.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“She was his wife in every way that mattered and that would save her.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“You don't see many shy terrorists.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Shy Carmen, always hanging back from the others, who knew she could smile? But at the sight of that smile he would have promised her anything. He was just barely awake. Or maybe he was not awake at all. Had he wanted her and not known it? Had he wanted her so much that he dreamed she was lying beside him now? The things our minds keep from us, Gen thought. The secrets we keep even from ourselves.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Gen stopped and talked to Simon Thaibault, who was reading One Hundred Years Of Solutide in Spanish.
'This will take me forever,' Thaibault said to Gen in French, 'Maybe a hundred years. At least I know I have the time.'

'Who knew that being kidnapped was so much like attending university?' Gen said.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Time could barely pull the second hand forward on the clock...”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day. Try it first with a bird, General Benjamin said gently to Alfredo. Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn't know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“...that it was so completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him like music.”
― Ann Patchett, ❴Bel :Canto