Question

Ann Patchett has stated, “Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves.” How does this quote apply to State of Wonder and your reading of this novel?

Answer 1

Ann Patchett has stated

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how. Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find. Composing is an occupation, an ability, but at the same time it's the spot to go in your mind. It is the nonexistent companion you drink your tea with toward the evening. A few people are destined to make incredible workmanship and others are destined to value it. … It is a sort of ability in itself, to be a crowd of people, regardless of whether you are the onlooker in the display or you are tuning in to the voice of the world's most noteworthy soprano. Not every person can be the craftsman. There must be the individuals who witness the craftsmanship, who love and acknowledge what they have been advantaged to see. Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong. Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. Perusing fiction not just builds up our creative energy and inventiveness, it gives us the aptitudes to be separated from everyone else. It enables us to feel sympathy for individuals we've never met, leading lives we couldn't in any way, shape or form involvement for ourselves, in light of the fact that the book puts us inside the character's skin.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now. I was beginning to think about whether I was prepared to be an author, not somebody who won prizes, got distributed and was since its getting late and space to work, however somebody who composed as a course of life. Possibly composing wouldn't have any prizes. Perhaps the salvation I would increase through work would just be passionate and scholarly. Wouldn't that be sufficient, to be a server who discovered an hour or two covered up in consistently to compose?