Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “You would needle and whine until finally we gave in. Your father and I would try to get you to come to the community hall and look at the quilts and pet the angora rabbits, but you wanted to eat chili corndogs and cotton candy and then get on one of those god-awful rides that had been put together by three heroin addicts with a sprocket wrench, the rides that made you feel like your head was going to be flung off your neck by centrifugal force.”

— Ann Patchett

452. “Lee was in his sixties, his hair gray, his glasses heavy. He had the sunburnt look of a man who took his golf shirts seriously.”

— Ann Patchett

453. “You don’t have to like your work to be good at it.”

— Ann Patchett

454. “Even the stupidest ideas have resonance once they’ve happened.”

— Ann Patchett

455. “She isn’t my mother.” He meant, of course, by simple mathematical extension, that his mother wasn’t Teddy’s mother either. Which meant that Bernadette, for whom he had lit a thousand candles, was the mother to whom his enormous love and devotion had no claim.”

— Ann Patchett

456. “One day was just the same as the next and so he reasoned there would never be exactly a right time or a wrong time.”

— Ann Patchett

457. “He patted their heads like drums. He patted them with a beat.”

— Ann Patchett

458. “When we do things differently, and very often we do, I remind myself that it is rarely a matter of right and wrong. We are simply two adults who grew up in different houses far away from one another.”

— Ann Patchett

459. “Sebastian was the one who was necessary. His interest in what we said.”

— Ann Patchett

460. “Everything looks so logical going backwards – Yes, of course, that’s what we did – but going forward it’s something else entirely. Going forward, the lights may as well be off.”

— Ann Patchett

461. “I had money but no idea of how to spend it, so I didn’t spend it. I liked the lightness of my life, the feeling that I could leave tomorrow.”

— Ann Patchett

462. “We will never know all the things other people worry about.”

— Ann Patchett

463. “The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, “You have no need for sight. Listen.”

— Ann Patchett

464. “The world is full of things we’re better off not knowing.”

— Ann Patchett

465. “I imagined that it was possible for people to have talents, great talents, that they never stumbled across in the course of their lives.”

— Ann Patchett

466. “Whenever I kissed a boy in school, cut a day of classes, argued with my mother, over what I can’t remember, it was not God’s forgiveness I sought, but his. He was the one I told.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

468. “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

469. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

471. “We could listen to podcasts until the hour of our death and not make a dent in the stories that are available to us.”

— Ann Patchett

472. “I can do nothing about the world and the flames beyond leaving free masks in the fruit stand, but the part in which we’re trapped is joy itself.”

— Ann Patchett

473. “You can learn more, and more quickly, from other people’s missteps than from their successes. If.”

— Ann Patchett

474. “Our parents divorced when I was four. I have many memories from early childhood, and though there are plenty of scenes in which both of my parents are present, I was too young to understand that they were married. They simply existed in the same house to take care of us. The explanation of what marriage was, and that it was over, all came in a single afternoon.”

— Ann Patchett

475. “If Kumar had his way they would leave for Fiji every year just before Thanksgiving and not return until the New Year rang in and the decorations came down. They would swim with the fishes and lie on the beach eating papaya. On the years they were tired of Fiji they would go to Bali or Sydney or any sunny, sandy place whose name contained an equal number of consonants and vowels.”

— Ann Patchett

476. “She didn’t even think about the drive. She was from Los Angeles; driving was simply part of it.”

— Ann Patchett

477. “And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against.”

— Ann Patchett

478. “There was no embarrassment there, only peace, only enough time left to ask for one more favor, which Franny thought was the deepest difference between women and men. His.”

— Ann Patchett

479. “Any configuration of luxury seen from a distance felt like a window on my youth.”

— Ann Patchett

480. “He would say he was finally free of his desire, and then that desire would come over him again like some sort of malarial fever.”

— Ann Patchett

481. “My mind did that quick mental calculation women must make when they find their exit blocked by a man they don’t know.”

— Ann Patchett

482. “Small orange butterflies tossed themselves through the air in front of us, one of them lighting on my wrist.”

— Ann Patchett

483. “Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don’t have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don’t understand, then I don’t have the time to explain it to you. If you don’t have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.”

— Ann Patchett

484. “When Lucy believed that there were actually things in the world that were worse than what had happened to her, she could pull herself up on this knowledge like a rope. When she lost sight of it, she sank.”

— Ann Patchett

485. “Marina filled her lungs with frozen air and smelled both winter and spring, dirt and leftover snow with the smallest undercurrent of something green.”

— Ann Patchett

486. “Lots of firemen got their start setting fires. They learn to set them, then they learn to put them out. Tom.”

— Ann Patchett

487. “We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.”

— Ann Patchett

488. “It smelled like a carnival wearing new clothes.”

— Ann Patchett

489. “No such thing as a spoiled bunny. This is an animal who possesses a limitless capacity for affection.”

— Ann Patchett

490. “Where do the periwinkles go in rain like that? It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true. Our Town taught me that. I had memorized the lessons.”

— Ann Patchett

491. “To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you’d never do it.”

— Ann Patchett

492. “I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn’t have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn’t that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write?”

— Ann Patchett

493. “They were her kidnappers, sailing her across the lawn and into the backseat of the car, lifting up her feet while pivoting her around in a way that was disturbingly professional, as if stealing old people was what they did.”

— Ann Patchett

494. “His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were old enough to be members of a terrorist organization.”

— Ann Patchett

495. “Maybe he was concerned, or bored, or inappropriately friendly, or midwestern friendly.”

— Ann Patchett

496. “The great love of his life, after God, lived only in dark vinyl.”

— Ann Patchett

497. “In that way the accident was like his mother’s death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different intervals but always there. It happened in the past and it was always happening. It happened every single minute of the day.”

— Ann Patchett

498. “We’re in a cherry orchard.” Emily raises her voice. “Who’s going to cancel us? The dog?”

— Ann Patchett

499. “I will write a check, because even while it isn’t much, it’s something, which has got to be better than doing nothing at all. I tell them not to let greatness be the enemy of goodness.”

— Ann Patchett

500. “The past, were I to type it up, would look like a disaster, but regardless of how it ended we all had many good days. In that sense the past is much like the present because the present – this unparalleled disaster – is the happiest time of my life:.”

— Ann Patchett