Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I will write my way into another life.”

— Ann Patchett

2. “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

3. “Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”

— Ann Patchett

4. “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

5. “Show kindness whenever possible. Show it to the people in front of you, the people coming up behind you, and the people with whom you are running neck and neck. It will vastly improve the quality of your own life, the lives of others, and the state of the world.”

— Ann Patchett

6. “Home, bed, sleep, mother – who knew more beautiful words than these?”

— Ann Patchett

7. “Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.”

— Ann Patchett

8. “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

9. “Just because things hadn’t gone the way I had planned didn’t necessarily mean they had gone wrong.”

— Ann Patchett

10. “Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame.”

— Ann Patchett

11. “Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?”

— Ann Patchett

12. “You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.”

— Ann Patchett

13. “That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of.”

— Ann Patchett

14. “Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.”

— Ann Patchett

15. “It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.”

— Ann Patchett

16. “The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.”

— Ann Patchett

17. “You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.”

— Ann Patchett

18. “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

19. “She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.”

— Ann Patchett

20. “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

21. “The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.”

— Ann Patchett

22. “Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.”

— Ann Patchett

23. “I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It’s a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.”

— Ann Patchett

24. “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

25. “Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.”

— Ann Patchett

26. “Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.”

— Ann Patchett

27. “If you want to write and can’t figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.”

— Ann Patchett

28. “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

29. “Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.”

— Ann Patchett

30. “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

31. “You are a duck, I would tell myself. This is rain.”

— Ann Patchett

32. “I’d been afraid I’d somehow been given a life I hadn’t deserved, but that’s ridiculous. We don’t deserve anything – not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.”

— Ann Patchett

33. “It’s always better to have too much to read than not enough.”

— Ann Patchett

34. “Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.”

— Ann Patchett

35. “It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”

— Ann Patchett

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “If someone loves you for what you can do then it’s flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.”

— Ann Patchett

40. “The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.”

— Ann Patchett

41. “Maybe the private life wasn’t forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.”

— Ann Patchett

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Sometimes if there’s a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.”

— Ann Patchett

45. “No one tells the truth to people they don’t actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.”

— Ann Patchett

46. “People gave me such a bad time about wanting a baby. I didn’t want a baby, and I still don’t. I wanted a dog.”

— Ann Patchett

47. “The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.”

— Ann Patchett

48. “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

49. “For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.”

— Ann Patchett

50. “How had one man acquired so many extension cords, so many batteries and rosary beads? Holding hands in the parking lot, Tavia and I swore a quiet oath: we would not do this to anyone. We would not leave the contents of our lives for someone else to sort through, because who would that mythical sorter be anyway?”

— Ann Patchett