Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.”

— Ann Patchett

52. “It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.”

— Ann Patchett

53. “This was the practice: I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death. They didn’t protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like many layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now, I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets I’d accumulated. I had begun the journey of digging out.”

— Ann Patchett

54. “Everyone knows everything eventually.”

— Ann Patchett

55. “One must not be shy where language is concerned.”

— Ann Patchett

56. “Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.”

— Ann Patchett

57. “Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.”

— Ann Patchett

58. “It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.”

— Ann Patchett

59. “The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.”

— Ann Patchett

60. “Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.”

— Ann Patchett

61. “There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.”

— Ann Patchett

62. “Part of it is living in Tennessee. I’m so out of the loop. And as a person, I’m out of the loop. I’m oblivious by nature.”

— Ann Patchett

63. “It’s easier to love a woman when you can’t understand a word she’s saying.”

— Ann Patchett

64. “The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.”

— Ann Patchett

65. “Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.”

— Ann Patchett

66. “He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.”

— Ann Patchett

67. “If you’ve had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins.”

— Ann Patchett

68. “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

69. “The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.”

— Ann Patchett

70. “If you want to write and can’t figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.”

— Ann Patchett

71. “Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.”

— Ann Patchett

72. “No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn’t complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do.”

— Ann Patchett

73. “If you’re trying to find out what’s coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.”

— Ann Patchett

74. “Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.”

— Ann Patchett

75. “Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.”

— Ann Patchett

76. “When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”

— Ann Patchett

77. “We are, however, entirely responsible for procrastination, and in the best of all possible worlds, we should also be responsible for being honest with ourselves about what is really going on. I.”

— Ann Patchett

78. “I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.”

— Ann Patchett

79. “But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.”

— Ann Patchett

80. “As for death, I have remained lucky. Its indifference has never waned, though surely it will circle back for me later. Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.”

— Ann Patchett

81. “You are four days sober and I love you. You’re about to get in your BMW and I love you. You are not my problem to solve but my brother to love, all of you.”

— Ann Patchett

82. “You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no.”

— Ann Patchett

83. “I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.”

— Ann Patchett

84. “Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.”

— Ann Patchett

85. “If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.”

— Ann Patchett

86. “That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.”

— Ann Patchett

87. “I don’t write for an audience, I don’t think whether my book will sell, I don’t sell it before I finish writing it.”

— Ann Patchett

88. “It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.”

— Ann Patchett

89. “Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.”

— Ann Patchett

90. “The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.”

— Ann Patchett

91. “I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it’s like writing a grocery list.”

— Ann Patchett

92. “Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one’s partner on both the left and the right.”

— Ann Patchett

93. “Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.”

— Ann Patchett

94. “Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.”

— Ann Patchett

95. “Even though I didn’t know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.”

— Ann Patchett

96. “There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself. It was an almost unbearably vivid present I found myself in that winter when Maeve drove me to Connecticut in the Oldsmobile.”

— Ann Patchett

97. “Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.”

— Ann Patchett

98. “Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.”

— Ann Patchett

99. “I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We’re easy going, we are ourselves. There isn’t a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it’s an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.”

— Ann Patchett

100. “I received a gift – it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my 25 years of live. “Does your husband make you a better person?”

— Ann Patchett