Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

453. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

461. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

463. “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

464. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

466. “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

467. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

469. “The parents napped like febrile toddlers.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

471. “Transcendentalist movement?”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

479. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

486. “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

487. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

490. “You don’t look like you should be with me,” he said, falling into the enchantment of the movie they made together. He.”

— Ann Patchett

491. “He hadn’t looked at the list, but if she were standing at.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

493. “So I’ve come to Chicago to have a drink,” he said. “I’m living in Iowa City for now. Have you ever been to Iowa City?” “I.”

— Ann Patchett

494. “If my father was no longer there to tell me what kind of man I should be, I still knew what he would have expected.”

— Ann Patchett

495. “Why, she wanted to ask them, with all the empty stools to choose from, would they want to sit so close? She.”

— Ann Patchett

496. “It turned out the real heartbreak of the vow of poverty was never being able to buy presents for the people who were so clearly in need.”

— Ann Patchett

497. “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

498. “The joy of my childhood ended not when my mother left, but when Maeve left, the year Andrea and my father.”

— Ann Patchett

499. “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

500. “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