Kathy Patterson

“What the child clamors for is the story of their own family, of the widower’s house into which her grandmother married, a landlocked dwelling in a land of water, a house full of mysteries. But such memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“Death is always a harsh taskmaster, and it serves no one for me to succumb to despair. In that moment, I resolve to bury the memory of our last conversation forever. Mr. Morgan gave me so much that I treasure, and I have always known that he treasured me. It can only diminish his life to remember the angry, despairing man he became in the last months of his life.”
― Marie Benedict, The Personal Librarian

“And he had learned that pity was insatiable—a false virtue that always craved more suffering to show how limitless and magnificent it could be.”
― Hernan Diaz, In the Distance

“How strange is the power of geography and law that we could leave New York City as white people but arrive in Washington, DC, as colored.”
― Marie Benedict, The Personal Librarian