Top 100 Ann Patchett Quotes
#1. She was not one to set her teeth so far into something that she couldn't let go when presented with the truth.
Ann Patchett
#2. sense trying to make him feel bad about it. She tilted back her glass and went past the gin for a second time. She
Ann Patchett
#3. That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.
Ann Patchett
#4. You are always someones favorite unfolding story
Ann Patchett
#5. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
Ann Patchett
#6. This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out.
Ann Patchett
#7. The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
Ann Patchett
#8. Other CEOs were shown fly-fishing in Scottish rivers or piloting their own Learjets into Helsinki. Mr. Hosokawa was photographed at home in the leather chair he sat in when he listened, a Nansei EX-12 stereo system behind him.
Ann Patchett
#9. We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides.
Ann Patchett
#10. The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
Ann Patchett
#11. The terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone ...
Ann Patchett
#12. The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.
Ann Patchett
#13. Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
Ann Patchett
#14. So I've come to Chicago to have a drink," he said. "I'm living in Iowa City for now. Have you ever been to Iowa City?" "I
Ann Patchett
#15. It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett
#17. Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It's not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.
Ann Patchett
#18. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air.
Ann Patchett
#19. DAs were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit. The
Ann Patchett
#20. I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Ann Patchett
#21. I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.
Ann Patchett
#22. No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do
Ann Patchett
#23. The impressions we pick up as children, when our minds are still open to influence and as soft as damp sponges, are likely to stay with us the longest.
Ann Patchett
#24. Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It's a plague. It's like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it.
STATE OF WONDER
Ann Patchett
#25. It's not more complicated than that," she said. "That's all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?" Look
Ann Patchett
#26. Every drop of rain hit the ground with such force it bounced back up again, giving the earth the appearance of something boiling.
Ann Patchett
#27. They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.
Ann Patchett
#28. I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what they wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren't other people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog.
Ann Patchett
#29. Shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
Ann Patchett
#30. Kentucky, a state whose capital I did not know. I had never wondered about Kentucky, never imagined it as a girl the way I had New York or Houston or Paris. No one I knew had ever been to Kentucky, or was planning on going, and so I thought it would be the last place anyone would look for me. "Tell
Ann Patchett
#31. 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.
Ann Patchett
#32. No, you don't look at the cigarette, you look at me. When you light a cigarette you have to look the person in the eyes.
Ann Patchett
#33. With Tennessee there to visit, Regina Cleri had been bearable to him, and without her he felt like what he was: a useless old man who had been shelved away to die.
Ann Patchett
#34. I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.
Ann Patchett
#35. Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.
Ann Patchett
#36. I slept like his sister would have, without trouble or dreams.
Ann Patchett
#37. I was still in high school when I decided I didn't want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my mind.
Ann Patchett
#38. I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.
Ann Patchett
#39. There was no explanation for how the school, which was the major source of misery in their lives, could have been transformed into the most compelling place on earth simply by virtue of its being Saturday. What a difference a day makes, Albie's
Ann Patchett
#40. Instead of following her original plan to have an abortion, she and Fode had decided to conduct a radical social experiment they called Having the Baby, and because of the outcome of that experiment, she had dropped out of school.
Ann Patchett
#41. Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
Ann Patchett
#42. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
Ann Patchett
#43. There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.
Ann Patchett
#44. She was shocked by how bad he looked. Cancer really was the devil's handshake.
Ann Patchett
#45. But part of what I love about both novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive.
Ann Patchett
#46. It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
Ann Patchett
#48. But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.
Ann Patchett
#49. Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.
Ann Patchett
#50. Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.
Ann Patchett
#51. It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they'd wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness. The
Ann Patchett
#53. Gen, with his genius for languages, was often at a loss for what to say when left with only his own words.
Ann Patchett
#54. We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.
Ann Patchett
#55. Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not unlike seeing tigers at the zoo.
Ann Patchett
#56. The world is full of things we're better off not knowing.
Ann Patchett
#58. At least she was not a tall woman. She was a pixie, a pocket Venus.
Ann Patchett
#59. She did have friends, she had just made a decision to stay home and experiment with dying.
Ann Patchett
#60. No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It's simply not worth it. This is not medical school.
Ann Patchett
#61. Your guilt's got nothing on my guilt," Franny said. "Your guilt isn't even in the ballpark.
Ann Patchett
#62. Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.
Ann Patchett
#63. Neither Doyle nor Sullivan had ever been to visit him at Regina Cleri, and Tip had only come one time and then left after five minutes. To Father Sullivan it was as if this part of his family, these people whom he loved, had all packed up and gone to Africa.
Ann Patchett
#64. When Teresa was told that she had lost summers, she made a point to curse and weep, but she wondered silently if she hadn't just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation.
Ann Patchett
#65. My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That's why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.
Ann Patchett
#66. Oh, my love,' she said. 'What do the only children do?'
'We'll never have to know.
Ann Patchett
#67. Eternal rest, grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and all the souls of the faithfully departed rest in peace. Amen.
Ann Patchett
#68. I had no interest in starting over again, but there are some people whom we grant the role of oracle in our lives and when they speak
rarely, gravely
we are well-advised to listen.
Ann Patchett
#71. It was nothing like Roxanne singing, where it seemed that everyone's heart would have to wait until she finished before it could beat again.
Ann Patchett
#72. It's a wonderful thing to find a great teacher, but you also have to find him or her at a time in life when you're able to listen to, trust, and implement the lessons you receive.
Ann Patchett
#73. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.
Ann Patchett
#74. stopped by this. Even she, who knew next to nothing
Ann Patchett
#75. Far outside the city the tree frogs were calling her, and the deep, rhythmic pulse of their voices set the blood flow to her heart.
Ann Patchett
#76. He couldn't help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. "Is
Ann Patchett
#77. We both had our first kiss from the same boy in college (a sainted and tender soul who must have made it his business to kiss the girls who would have otherwise graduated unkissed).
Ann Patchett
#78. The quality of a life is defined not by its length, but by its depth, its actions and achievements. It is defined by our ability to love.
Ann Patchett
#79. He looked around the house and declared the entire situation straight-up Fitzgerald, so much so that sleeping over would have to be part of it. Astrid,
Ann Patchett
#80. An essential element of being a writer is learning whom to listen to and whom to ignore where your work is concerned. Every
Ann Patchett
#81. If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.
Ann Patchett
#82. That's why you can eat cheesecake,' she said, and sighed. 'Because you don't. That's the way it works.
Ann Patchett
#83. He was a very small man, both in stature and girth, who had been chosen as a running mate as much for his size as for his political beliefs. The pervasive thinking in government was that a taller vice president would make the President appear weak, replaceable.
Ann Patchett
#84. He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence.
Ann Patchett
#85. Lots of firemen got their start setting fires. They learn to set them, then they learn to put them out. Tom
Ann Patchett
#86. 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, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
Ann Patchett
#87. It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
Ann Patchett
#88. Writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.
Ann Patchett
#89. Someday we'll look back on all of this and we won't even believe we were here," she whispered. "We'll say, 'Do you remember when we used to live in Iowa?'" I smiled, warm, already falling back to sleep. I told her, "We'll say, 'That happened during the Iowa years.
Ann Patchett
#90. In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.
Ann Patchett
#92. You can't control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.
Ann Patchett
#93. Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.
Ann Patchett
#94. A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost.
Ann Patchett
#95. To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you'd never do it.
Ann Patchett
#96. but sometimes all the right things are as useless as nothing at all. Life,
Ann Patchett
#97. But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.
Ann Patchett
#98. Stories are based in conflict, and when the conflict is resolved the story ends. That's because for the most part happiness is amorphous, wordless, and largely uninteresting.
Ann Patchett
#99. Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.
Ann Patchett
#100. If someone gave you a device with which you could see entire worlds just by holding it in front of your eyes, worlds of such beauty and complexity that they took your breath away ... wouldn't you want to show this device to everyone you knew?
Ann Patchett
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