Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You are always someones favorite unfolding story.”

— Ann Patchett

52. “Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.”

— Ann Patchett

53. “It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.”

— Ann Patchett

54. “I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.”

— Ann Patchett

55. “But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.”

— Ann Patchett

56. “I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.”

— Ann Patchett

57. “Everyone knows everything eventually.”

— Ann Patchett

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

63. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

66. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

68. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

70. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

92. “Minnesota! It smelled like raspberries and sunlight and tender grass. It was summer and everything was more beautiful than any picture she had carried with her... There had never been a place in the world as beautiful as Minnesota.”

— Ann Patchett

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

100. “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