Top 100 Ann Patchett Quotes
#1. Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for. - Ann Patchett, from the essay The Sense of an Ending
Megan Hart
#2. Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.
Caroline Leavitt
#3. It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett
#4. When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckett
as told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett
Samuel Beckett
#5. Sometimes not having any idea where we're going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
Ann Patchett
#6. But over time people break apart, no matter how enormous the love they feel for one another is, and it is through the breaking and the reconciliation, the love and the doubting of love, the judgment and then the coming together again, that we find our own identity and define our relationships.
Ann Patchett
#7. 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
#8. Marina Singh: "You went to Radcliffe."
Annick Swenson: "I didn't love it.
Ann Patchett
#9. If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day. Try it first with a bird, General Benjamin said gently to Alfredo. Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn't know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.
Ann Patchett
#10. The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side.
Ann Patchett
#11. I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.
Ann Patchett
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
Ann Patchett
#15. There's no protecting anyone," Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. "Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
Ann Patchett
#16. You are always someones favorite unfolding story
Ann Patchett
#17. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
Ann Patchett
#18. This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out.
Ann Patchett
#19. The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
Ann Patchett
#20. and washing it off in the sink. "Finish up your lunch." "We're starting now?" "Good a
Ann Patchett
#21. You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature.
Ann Patchett
#22. I had to wait until the thought of not telling you was worse than the thought of telling you. Does
Ann Patchett
#23. I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.
Ann Patchett
#24. I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.
Ann Patchett
#25. The story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.
Ann Patchett
#26. Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?
Ann Patchett
#27. 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
#28. The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.
Ann Patchett
#29. We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides.
Ann Patchett
#30. At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was going something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all.
Ann Patchett
#31. The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
Ann Patchett
#32. I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open.
Ann Patchett
#33. I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible.
Ann Patchett
#34. Home, bed, sleep, mother
who knew more beautiful words than these?
Ann Patchett
#35. Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
Ann Patchett
#36. 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. The
Ann Patchett
#37. So was the movie excruciating to watch because nothing was right, or was it excruciating to watch because, impossibly, some things were? Every
Ann Patchett
#38. The terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone ...
Ann Patchett
#39. There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. 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. A kiss, another kiss.
Ann Patchett
#40. The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, You have no need for sight. Listen.
Ann Patchett
#41. The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.
Ann Patchett
#42. If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.
Ann Patchett
#43. Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
Ann Patchett
#44. It was already in place, without him seeing any of it, the web was spun and snug around the house, and while his first impulse, the natural impulse, was to press ahead anyway and see if he might beat out the odds, clear logic held him.
Ann Patchett
#45. 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
#46. When I hear Roxane sing I am still able to think well of the world," Gen said. "This is a world in which she can still sing that music with so much compassion. That's proof of something, isn't it?
Ann Patchett
#47. Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.
Ann Patchett
#48. Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
Ann Patchett
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I understood how we long to believe in goodness, especially in the person we promised to love and honor. It isn't just about them, it is how we want to see ourselves. It says that we are good people, patient and kind.
Ann Patchett
#54. I received a gift
it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my 25 years of live. Does your husband make you a better person?
Ann Patchett
#55. DAs were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit. The
Ann Patchett
#56. In the future, he will try to say her name enough, but he never can.
Ann Patchett
#57. They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them.
Ann Patchett
#58. He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.
Ann Patchett
#59. Have never subscribed to the notion of "writing what you know," at least not for myself. I don't know enough interesting things.
Ann Patchett
#60. I have always believed that the desire for revenge is one of life's great motivators, and my success would be my revenge
Ann Patchett
#61. had I listened to no one, or only to the people who liked me, the workshop would have been a waste of time.
Ann Patchett
#62. She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.
Ann Patchett
#63. If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.
Ann Patchett
#64. Nebraska was white, a page as still as fallen snow. It was not crosshatched with roads, overrun with the hard lines of interstate systems. It was a state on which you could make lists, jot down phone numbers, draw pictures.
Ann Patchett
#65. I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Ann Patchett
#66. As if music were a separate thing you could drive yourself into, make love to, fuck.
Ann Patchett
#67. I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.
Ann Patchett
#68. Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.
Ann Patchett
#69. 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
#70. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.
Ann Patchett
#71. For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly , and from sources you never imagined to be probable.
Ann Patchett
#72. 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
#73. If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.
Ann Patchett
#74. 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
#75. Hard work is first and foremost hard, and whether or not it's ultimately rewarding is very rarely the thing you're thinking of at the moment.
Ann Patchett
#76. 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
#78. 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
#79. Franny and Leo didn't talk about marriage, except sometimes sentimentally in bed, his hands spreading wide across her back, and even then it was only to say how quickly they would have married had it not been for the future and the past. What
Ann Patchett
#80. He'd told her she wouldn't have to do anything but lie on the big down sofa in the front room and read all day, or she could ride her bike to the beach and read.
Ann Patchett
#81. But together they moved through the world quite easily, two small halves of courage making a brave whole.
Ann Patchett
#82. If he saw himself as a famous novelist then he would have known she would be there, but if he saw himself as someone she had met in the bar, well, he was right. She
Ann Patchett
#83. 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
#84. Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
Ann Patchett
#85. They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.
Ann Patchett
#86. 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
#87. Shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
Ann Patchett
#88. The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.
Ann Patchett
#89. Always remember, any book you haven't read is still a new book.
Ann Patchett
#90. She understood in life that a person was only allowed one trip down to hell.
Ann Patchett
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. He doesn't know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this ... on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.
Ann Patchett
#94. Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.
Ann Patchett
#95. 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
#96. They were her kidnappers, sailing her across the lawn and into the backseat of the car, lifting up her feet while pivoting her around in a way that was disturbingly professional, as if stealing old people was what they did.
Ann Patchett
#97. 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
#98. They look into the mirror and all they can see is a collection of flaws,
Ann Patchett
#99. 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
#100. She would not attend the dinner (she did not eat before she sang) but would arrive at the end of the meal and perform six arias with her accompanist.
Ann Patchett
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