Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

455. “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

456. “I almost never got to an answer before Maeve did but in this case it was perfectly obvious. “Because the mother wasn’t there.” If there had been a woman in the apartment he never would have put himself in the middle of things. Mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than Maeve.”

— Ann Patchett

457. “Prosecutors should insist the trials of murderers and drug lords be held in economy class on crowded transatlantic flights, where any suspect would confess to any crime in exchange for the promise of a soft bed in a dark, quiet room.”

— Ann Patchett

458. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

460. “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

461. “The early years he had spent building Nansei were like a hurricane in his memory, a huge, overbearing wind into which every loose thing was sucked.”

— Ann Patchett

462. “Your guilt’s got nothing on my guilt,” Franny said. “Your guilt isn’t even in the ballpark.”

— Ann Patchett

463. “Every time I rolled the dice and moved the little iron forward, I thought how lucky I was: city, job, family, house.”

— Ann Patchett

464. “If he was right and God showed His face to the living then it was the surgeons to whom we should offer our novenas. Let us pray to the ones who keep our tired hearts pumping.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

466. “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

467. “The madder Maeve got, the more thoughtful she became. In this way she reminded me of our father – every word she spoke came individually wrapped.”

— Ann Patchett

468. “But part of what I love about both novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive.”

— Ann Patchett

469. “In my books, I make up the experiences and the characters, but the emotional life is real. It is my own.”

— Ann Patchett

470. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

472. “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

473. “The doors sealed them in with the music and sealed the world out and suddenly it was clear that building an opera house was a basic act of human survival. It kept them all from rotting in the unendurable heat. It saved their souls in ways those murdering Christian missionaries could never have envisioned.”

— Ann Patchett

474. “The universe had conspired to grant me a single decent game of tennis, and I went in with everything I had. I could see the.”

— Ann Patchett

475. “The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times.”

— Ann Patchett

476. “People made her tired. The way they were easy with one another, the way they seemed so natural, only made her sad.”

— Ann Patchett

477. “She shrugged. “I gave up caring where I lived a long time ago, and anyway, I think it’s good for me. It teaches me humility. She teaches me humility.” She tipped her head backwards the way Maeve would do. “You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself. Andrea’s my penance for all the mistakes.”

— Ann Patchett

478. “His heart woke him up to remind him that in life there was never a limitless number of nights. The.”

— Ann Patchett

479. “Life could very well be lived out in that spot. She tried to remember her aggressiveness, all the things the Generals had taught her in training, but it was one thing to take what you must for the good of the people and quite another to ask for something for yourself. She knew nothing at all about asking.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

481. “People simultaneously wanted to kill them, believed that they had almost killed them, and were afraid of being killed by them.”

— Ann Patchett

482. “To list the things I didn’t ask my father about would be to list the stars in heaven, so let me throw out one: I did not ask my father about women. Not women in general and what you were supposed to do with them, and definitely not women in the particular: my mother, my sister, Andrea.”

— Ann Patchett

483. “The distance between me and annihilation was the width of a snowflake.”

— Ann Patchett

484. “That’s the tricky part about being a saint. If you ever think of yourself as one it throws you out of the running. I’ve known people who thought they were saints, plenty of them, and believe you me, they were anything but.”

— Ann Patchett

485. “I am fifty-seven. I am twenty-four.”

— Ann Patchett

486. “He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.”

— Ann Patchett

487. “The President’s unwavering devotion to his television set was so potentially embarrassing his cabinet would gladly have traded it in for an indiscreet mistress.”

— Ann Patchett

488. “I felt a quick gust of annoyance and I let it turn to anger, anger being infinitely preferable to guilt.”

— Ann Patchett

489. “You have to remember that they could go at any time, and if a man’s smart he never forgets that.”

— Ann Patchett

490. “Maybe it was possible, we thought, to rise above the pathetic holidays of our youth.”

— Ann Patchett

491. “We had invented time, and we could not kill it fast enough. After dinner, dancing, and baths, we read, wrote our poems and stories, brushed our teeth, and tumbled into bed, only to find the next day was exactly the same. We had not moved one inch forward in the night. It was like prison, not in the punishment but in the vast sameness of the days. We were impossibly rich in time, and we lavished the excess on one another.”

— Ann Patchett

492. “Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in Doyle’s living room asking for the statue back.”

— Ann Patchett

493. “New York represented her shame about things that were in no way her fault.”

— Ann Patchett

494. “The problem, I wanted to say, was that I was asleep to the world.”

— Ann Patchett

495. “She took it all in, and as the stories of the past unfolded she had nothing but sympathy for me. Celeste wasn’t wondering why I had taken so long to tell her about my life, she took the fact that I was telling her now as proof of my love.”

— Ann Patchett

496. “People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go. But at seventeen, I didn’t understand, and so I left.”

— Ann Patchett

497. “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

498. “She could read the patterns, knew at a glance a Melas from a Konya, a Ladik from a Sivas. She loved the Ladik.”

— Ann Patchett

499. “The children had been happy to see me when I first came through the door the day before but since had discovered that I was the same person they’d always known.”

— Ann Patchett

500. “Teresa had once thought her husband to be the handsomest man in the world, when in fact he looked like one of those gargoyles perched on a high corner of Notre Dame that’s meant to scare the devil away.”

— Ann Patchett