Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I had to wait until the thought of not telling you was worse than the thought of telling you. Does.”

— Ann Patchett

452. “If you grow corn or trade in pigs or write poetry then you go to Iowa City.” “That’s why I haven’t been.”

— Ann Patchett

453. “Field after field after field, and not an inch of space wasted on something as decorative and meaningless as a tree. “You’ve.”

— Ann Patchett

454. “We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”

— Ann Patchett

455. “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers.”

— Ann Patchett

456. “Where will they build the new Health Sciences building?” He waved his hand as if to indicate up there, north. “I have no idea. You’d think that would be the first order of business, but until they get that major gift they don’t make any commitments. I imagine it has to be somewhere near the Armory. Do you know about the Armory? What a disaster that’s going to be.”

— Ann Patchett

457. “His understanding that he would eventually lose every sweetness that had come to him only made him hold those very things closer to his chest.”

— Ann Patchett

458. “Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women.”

— Ann Patchett

459. “I’ve never believed the women of the world are entitled to leave every one of their options open for a lifetime.”

— Ann Patchett

460. “It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days.”

— Ann Patchett

461. “Tell me you’re going to be a shrink. It would be so beneficial.”

— Ann Patchett

462. “She could get more information across with an eyebrow than other people could with a microphone.”

— Ann Patchett

463. “Doy was not my problem to solve but my brother to love.”

— Ann Patchett

464. “I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.”

— Ann Patchett

465. “It’s like a big circle. I’ve gone on a get-a-man crusade, but so far it’s been a disaster and I’m feeling as bad about myself as I ever have. I know I’m a great person and all that, a good friend, but I feel like real bottom of the barrel girlfriend material.”

— Ann Patchett

466. “Because I was fifteen and generally an idiot, I thought that the feeling of home I was experiencing had to do with the car and where it was parked, instead of attributing it wholly and gratefully to my sister.”

— Ann Patchett

467. “It’s like this enormous tree had just crashed through the house and I was picking up the leaves so no one would notice what had happened.”

— Ann Patchett

468. “She was shocked by how bad he looked. Cancer really was the devil’s handshake.”

— Ann Patchett

469. “At home, the puppy Rose played with balls, struggled with the stairs, and slept behind my knees while we watched in adoration. It’s not that I was unhappy in what I now think of as “the dogless years,” but I suspected things could be better. What I never could have imagined was how much better they would be. Whatever holes I had in my life, in my character, were suddenly filled. I had entered into my first adult relationship of mutual, unconditional love.”

— Ann Patchett

470. “The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.”

— Ann Patchett

471. “The sound he was making was the sound Cal had made right before he died, that same high-pitched whistling that was, if not the opposite of breathing, at least the very end of breathing. “It’s.”

— Ann Patchett

472. “People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did.”

— Ann Patchett

473. “To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid.”

— Ann Patchett

474. “Then I remembered what my father had told me, that the things we could do nothing about were best put out of our minds. I gave it a try and found that it was easier than I imagined.”

— Ann Patchett

475. “I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.”

— Ann Patchett

476. “If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, “I’ll be playing in Carnegie Hall next month!” you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to The New Yorker.”

— Ann Patchett

477. “It must be a comfort, having them with you,” Andrea said to him, not of his children but of his paintings.”

— Ann Patchett

478. “The parents napped like febrile toddlers.”

— Ann Patchett

479. “Sometimes I think of people in terms of units of energy.”

— Ann Patchett

480. “Transcendentalist movement?”

— Ann Patchett

481. “He couldn’t help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. “Is.”

— Ann Patchett

482. “The words “Ask Your Doctor” parked across the top of the screen, as if the advertisers had anticipated everyone turning off the sound. Franny wondered if the drug was for depression, an overactive bladder, thinning hair.”

— Ann Patchett

483. “I still don’t understand this,” Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. “How did he wind up with my life?” “It isn’t your life,” Leo said. “That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s my imagination.”

— Ann Patchett

484. “When I go down the hall and find Maisie and Nell asleep in their twin beds, I see them both as they are and as they were: grown women and little girls.”

— Ann Patchett

485. “We were members of the audience and they were slender gods, brilliant and terrifying. They lit the room with the lightning of their drunken grief and extravagant love.”

— Ann Patchett

486. “It was like that for the rest of the summer. It was like that every summer the six of them were together. Not that the days were always fun, most of them weren’t, but they did things, real things, and they never got caught.”

— Ann Patchett

487. “If anyone is going to shoot me they will have to shoot me while I’m singing.”

— Ann Patchett

488. “Why did my mother leave?”

— Ann Patchett

489. “Did you ever want to be a writer?” “No,” she said, and she would have told him. “I only wanted to be a reader.”

— Ann Patchett

490. “You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself.”

— Ann Patchett

491. “The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation.”

— Ann Patchett

492. “He liked to talk about the criminals he had put away, and how a person never knew, and how he had to protect his family, and how he wasn’t going to let the other guy make the first move, but really it was just that Bert liked guns. The.”

— Ann Patchett

493. “For twenty-two years Sabine had told her stories to one person, so that the action and the telling had become inseparable. What was left was half a life, the one where she lived it but had nothing later to give shape to the experience.”

— Ann Patchett

494. “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

495. “I’ve always been a believer in repression.”

— Ann Patchett

496. “If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”

— Ann Patchett

497. “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

498. “Only Mr. Hosokawa and the priest completely understood the importance of the music. Every note was distinct. It was the measurement of the time which had gotten away from them. It was the interpretation of their lives in the very moment they were being lived.”

— Ann Patchett

499. “In 1954, money was precious; train tickets and operas were unimaginable things. In a different time, such a production would have seemed too complicated for a child, but this was only a handful of years after the war and children then were much more likely to understand a whole host of things that might seem impossible for children now. They.”

— Ann Patchett

500. “The sick were a ferocious lot. They’d walk right through you if they thought that health was on the other side.”

— Ann Patchett