Stephanie Fleischer

“When people asked if I needed any help I told them no, my friend was coming right back, but after another half hour, after every other person had trickled away, I had to concede that not even good old Saint Sebastian was coming to get me. That was when I saw how the backs of theater seats could provide a stable means of transfer. I stood and held one and then the next and the next, hopping my way to the aisle and then hopping my way up the stairs row by row, all the way back to where my wheelchair was waiting. I used the chair as a walker, pushing it through the door until I got outside and got myself seated and got myself very slowly back home in the dark. Funnily enough, this turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“I don’t see why you have to give up one for the other,” she says. “You don’t have to,” I tell my daughter. “You want to. You wake up one day and you don’t want the carnival anymore. In fact, you can’t even believe you did that.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake