Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “We weren’t particularly interesting,” I say. Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs. “Did.”

— Ann Patchett

102. “Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink.”

— Ann Patchett

103. “No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.”

— Ann Patchett

104. “Death was the river that ran underground, always. It was just that we had piled up so much junk to keep from hearing it.”

— Ann Patchett

105. “I do not believe that there were more happy marriages before divorce became socially acceptable, that people tried harder, got through their rough times, and were better off. I believe that more people suffered.”

— Ann Patchett

106. “When we come home, I fill the blender with spinach, a banana, an avocado, two dates, some lemon juice, water and ice, and my husband and I drink the results for breakfast. From time to time I believe I’ve found The Answer to Life, and right now I think it’s spinach.”

— Ann Patchett

107. “Learn to write by writing.”

— Ann Patchett

108. “I read an article recently about how friendships can die over time. We shouldn’t feel bad about it, the article said. People change after all, grow in different directions: nothing lasts forever. It’s true, of course, that we have changed, but Tavia and I are in this life together. We found each other as little girls, and through everything, we’ve held on.”

— Ann Patchett

109. “I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what they wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren’t other people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog.”

— Ann Patchett

110. “Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.”

— Ann Patchett

111. “The only thing I wanted was a life that God did not intend for me to have. I suffered the loss of things that were never mine.”

— Ann Patchett

112. “Mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than Maeve. After our mother left, Maeve took up the job on my behalf but no one did the same for her.”

— Ann Patchett

113. “Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.”

— Ann Patchett

114. “Divorce is in the machine now, like love and birth and death. Its possibility informs us, even when it goes untouched. And if we fail at marriage, we are lucky we don’t have to fail with the force of our whole life.”

— Ann Patchett

115. “Maeve, speak up. Don’t expect that anyone will do you the favor of listening if you don’t trouble yourself to use your voice.”

— Ann Patchett

116. “Sapphire sky, diamond clouds, emerald leaves, ruby cherries. The magic with which Nell understands overwhelms me at times.”

— Ann Patchett

117. “People are not characters, no matter how often we tell them they are; conversations are not dialogue; and the actions of our days don’t add up to a plot. In life, time runs along in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensed-one action springboards into another, greater action. and effect are so much clearer in novels than in life. You might not see how everything threads together as you read along, but when you look back from the end of the story, the becomes map clear.”

— Ann Patchett

118. “Work for the good of the collective, root for the team, get over yourself.”

— Ann Patchett

119. “The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.”

— Ann Patchett

120. “We are, on this earth, so incredibly small, in the history of time, in the crowd of the world, we are practically invisible, not even a dot, and yet we have each other to hold on to. 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

121. “What if this joy you felt, this love, was so great that you wanted to share it with everyone, but they all rushed right by you, looking in the other direction?” 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

122. “To have a child required the willful forgetting of what childhood was actually like; it required you to turn away from the very real chance that you would do to the person you loved most in the world the exact same thing that was done to you. No, no thank you.”

— Ann Patchett

123. “You are a duck, I would tell myself. This is rain.”

— Ann Patchett

124. “People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappoint them, or if they do, the owners manage to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me.”

— Ann Patchett

125. “There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it.”

— Ann Patchett

126. “Her mother was lost in a sea of irregular verbs.”

— Ann Patchett

127. “Women had read about their liberation in books but not many of them had seen what it looked like in action.”

— Ann Patchett

128. “When my sister’s husband died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-nine, I fell down the open manhole with my sister and the rest of the people who loved him. But my father? He’d been gone for such a long time. He had told us how much he loved us, and we’d told him how much we loved him, again and again and again, until there was nothing left to say. Except for this: Dad, there is joy in the place that you left.”

— Ann Patchett

129. “His grief was a river as deep and as wide as my own. I knew that I should have gone to him later, I should have tried to comfort him, but there was no comfort in me.”

— Ann Patchett

130. “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.”

— Ann Patchett

131. “There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on... These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, “How far would you go for me?” you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, “Farther than you would ever have thought was possible.”

— Ann Patchett

132. “She was a magnificent child, and the whole world was laid out in front of her, covered in stars.”

— Ann Patchett

133. “There are in life a few miraculous moments when the right person is there to tell you what you need to hear and you are still open enough, impressionable enough, to take it in.”

— Ann Patchett

134. “What was it like?” she asks me again. It was like being a leaf in a river. I fell in and was carried along.”

— Ann Patchett

135. “Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.”

— Ann Patchett

136. “Franny and Leo didn’t talk about marriage, except sometimes sentimentally in bed, his hands spreading wide across her back, and even then it was only to say how quickly they would have married had it not been for the future and the past.”

— Ann Patchett

137. “For the guests of Mr. Hosokawa’s birthday party, most of the day was spent wandering from window to window, maybe playing a hand of cards or looking at a magazine, as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.”

— Ann Patchett

138. “Simon Thibault would never die in a foolish gesture for Edith. On the contrary, he would take every cowardly recourse available to him to ensure that their lives were spent together.”

— Ann Patchett

139. “To grow up with a mother who had run off to India, never to be heard from again, that was one thing – there was closure in that, its own kind of death. But to find out she was fifteen stops away on the Number One train to Canal and had failed to be in touch was barbaric. Whatever romantic notions I might have harbored, whatever excuses or allowances my heart had ever made on her behalf, blew out like a match.”

— Ann Patchett

140. “We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands.”

— Ann Patchett

141. “Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?”

— Ann Patchett

142. “The future is not one thing. So many possibilities can arise as a result of intelligence, education, curiosity, and hard work. No one ever told me that, and I’m sorry it took this long for me to figure it out.”

— Ann Patchett

143. “Had I known anything about the elegance of quitting at the right time, I would have made so many people, starting with myself and Dennis, so much happier.”

— Ann Patchett

144. “Clearly, we are not all ruined, and if we are, at some point it becomes our own responsibility.”

— Ann Patchett

145. “It’s about falling so wildly in love with him – the way one will at twenty-four – that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end, nor did it occur to me to care.”

— Ann Patchett

146. “This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out.”

— Ann Patchett

147. “The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”

— Ann Patchett

148. “Amazon has opened a brick-and-mortar store in the mall across the street from us. People want to know how well we are doing. I’ll tell you how well we’re doing: they’ve come to kill us. But we’ll survive.”

— Ann Patchett

149. “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

150. “But sooner or later you have to do something. If you think you’re going to find one thing that will be perfect for you, you’re going to spend your eightieth birthday reading the want ads.”

— Ann Patchett