Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I was a writer and nothing else, and to miss seeing me as such was to miss me altogether.”

— Ann Patchett

452. “The number of things I’d failed to grasp back then was as limitless as the stars in the night sky.”

— Ann Patchett

453. “Fire leapt off her, like the fire in the fireplace spitting and cracking behind me. The snow came down and covered the fields. I wanted to take my sweater off, wrap her up. I wanted to roll her around until the fire was out.”

— Ann Patchett

454. “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

455. “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

456. “After years of living in response to the past, we had somehow miraculously become unstuck, moving forward in time.”

— Ann Patchett

457. “You’d push a towel under the door so none of the light got out,” Maeve said. “It’s funny, but somehow I had it in my mind that light was rationed, everything was rationed so we couldn’t let the light we weren’t using just pour out on the floor. We had to keep it all in the closet with us.”

— Ann Patchett

458. “Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand.”

— Ann Patchett

459. “Making friends with other writers you respect is reason enough to go to graduate school. You.”

— Ann Patchett

460. “I always believed her, if for no other reason than I didn’t know how not to.”

— Ann Patchett

461. “The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.”

— Ann Patchett

462. “I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.”

— Ann Patchett

463. “Parts of this story they already know, and this is one of them. The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.”

— Ann Patchett

464. “All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All.”

— Ann Patchett

465. “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

466. “They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.”

— Ann Patchett

467. “I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. 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

468. “He saw Mr. Otterson as the Willy Wonka of produce.”

— Ann Patchett

469. “I slept like his sister would have, without trouble or dreams.”

— Ann Patchett

470. “No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It.”

— Ann Patchett

471. “There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.”

— Ann Patchett

472. “She stopped there, a sudden flush of panic rising up her neck. This was a woman whose biology betrayed her at every turn. Emotions stormed across her face with a flag.”

— Ann Patchett

473. “Maybe he was just a decent man. I had started to think.”

— Ann Patchett

474. “But in her day, Emily had been a beast, a teenage girl so riven with hormones and rage that her two younger sisters decided it would be easier to just be good. Emily had raised sufficient hell for all of them put together. We worried that her devotion to the orchard might be some latent penance for bad behavior. She was trying to make it up to us long after we had ceased to be hurt.”

— Ann Patchett

475. “When did the mammals get confusing? Who can’t look at a baby and a puppy and see the differences? You can’t leave babies at home alone with a chew toy when you go to the movies. Babies will not shimmy under the covers to sleep on your feet when you’re cold. Babies, for all their many unarguable charms, will not run with you in the park, or wait by the door for your return, and, as far as I can tell, they know absolutely nothing of unconditional love.”

— Ann Patchett

476. “I only understood what I’d lost.”

— Ann Patchett

477. “In the absence of language, she believed that he agreed with her completely.”

— Ann Patchett

478. “It was not as natural as it appeared. It was more like milking a cow, easy as long as someone else was doing it.”

— Ann Patchett

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

483. “But he was teaching you a lesson you’d be wise to learn: you can’t save them that won’t save themselves.”

— Ann Patchett

484. “I could watch myself grappling with the same themes in my writing and in my life: what I needed, whom I loved, what I could let go, and how much energy the letting go would take. Again and again, I was asking what mattered most in this precarious and precious life.”

— Ann Patchett

485. “Isn’t that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?”

— Ann Patchett

486. “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

487. “Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable.”

— Ann Patchett

488. “The art of writing comes way down the line, as does the art of interpreting Bach. 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. 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

489. “He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence.”

— Ann Patchett

490. “Lelia gave a dharma talk about letting go of self-definition: I can’t do this because of what happened to me in my childhood; I can’t do that because I am very shy; I could never go there because I’m afraid of clowns or mushrooms or polar bears. The group gave a gentle, collective laugh of self-recognition. Teresa found the talk helpful, as she had been having an extended interior dialogue during meditation about how septuagenarians from Torrance were fundamentally unsuited for Buddhism.”

— Ann Patchett

491. “A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost.”

— Ann Patchett

492. “Ninety percent of what I know about fiction writing I learned that year. Write it out. Tell the truth. Stack up the pages. Learn to write by writing.”

— Ann Patchett

493. “Watching her face is like going to a movie.”

— Ann Patchett

494. “All these years later, it’s still the best description of how I feel about books. I would stand in an airport to tell people about how much I love books, reading them, writing them, making sure other people felt comfortable reading and writing them.”

— Ann Patchett

495. “I was desperate to be good, but all that did was make me look desperate.”

— Ann Patchett

496. “The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”

— Ann Patchett

497. “The game, frankly, was more peaceful without language.”

— Ann Patchett

498. “I took some rea; comfort from my day job. Like a soprano’s boned corset, the built-in restrictions provided both support and something to push against.”

— Ann Patchett

499. “The idea that she would have the opportunity to get over something thrilled her. The.”

— Ann Patchett

500. “Politicians never mentioned the details of life because of course the details that appealed to one person could repel another, so what you wound up with in the end were a long string of generalities, stirring platitudes that could not buy you supper.”

— Ann Patchett