Ann Patchett What Now Quotes

#1. You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature.

Ann Patchett

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

Ann Patchett

#7. 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

#8. We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides.

Ann Patchett

#9. 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

#10. The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.

Ann Patchett

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.

Ann Patchett

#15. 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

#16. I had to wait until the thought of not telling you was worse than the thought of telling you. Does

Ann Patchett

#17. Sometimes not having any idea where we're going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

Ann Patchett

#18. and washing it off in the sink. "Finish up your lunch." "We're starting now?" "Good a

Ann Patchett

#19. The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

Ann Patchett

#20. This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out.

Ann Patchett

#21. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world

Ann Patchett

#22. You are always someones favorite unfolding story

Ann Patchett

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.

Ann Patchett

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Marina Singh: "You went to Radcliffe."
Annick Swenson: "I didn't love it.

Ann Patchett

#31. 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

#32. 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