Ann Patchett

Wow.

Which is...

Something that I did for Lent with my friend Kate DiCamillo, famous children's book writer, famous swearer.

And the two of us decided we were going to stop swearing for Lent.

And not only we were going to stop swearing, we were going to do right speech.

And right speech means...

If you break a glass, you don't say to yourself, oh, you're such an idiot.

I can't believe I did that.

You just say, oh, I broke a glass.

Wow, good thing I had that glass all those years or whatever.

You don't yell at people who cut you off in traffic.

You just don't participate in that kind of speech.

And I found that it lowered my temperature by 10 degrees.

It was incredible.

And instead of...

swearing, either out loud or in my mind when something irritating happened, I had to stop and think about how I actually felt.

Because the feeling was usually more complicated than just a single word that you could scream, like if you drop a hammer on your toe.

And

I never went back to swearing.

And I really swore.