Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “We weren’t particularly interesting,” I say. Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs. “Did.”

— Ann Patchett

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

112. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

123. “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

124. “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

125. “People want you to want what they want. If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated. If you don’t want the same things, your lack of wanting can, to certain people, come across as judgment.”

— Ann Patchett

126. “Why did my mother leave?”

— Ann Patchett

127. “The only way to really understand what money means is to have been poor,” he said to me when we were eating lunch in the car. “That’s the strike you have against you. A boy grows up rich like you, never wanting for anything, never being hungry” – he shook his head, as if it had been a disappointing choice I’d made – “I don’t know how a person overcomes a thing like that.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

129. “I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires to not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.”

— Ann Patchett

130. “The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it.”

— Ann Patchett

131. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

133. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

135. “Cancer really was the devil’s handshake.”

— Ann Patchett

136. “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

137. “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.”

— Ann Patchett

138. “Wearing shoes in the house was barbaric. There was almost as much indignity in wearing shoes in the house as there was in being kidnapped.”

— Ann Patchett

139. “There is a finite amount of time,” Maeve said. “Maybe I understand that better now. I’ve wanted my mother back since I was ten years old, and now she’s here. I can use the time I’ve got to be furious, or I can feel like the luckiest person in the world.” “Those are the two choices?”

— Ann Patchett

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “The kitchen was at the back of the house and there was a window over the sink. Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink. “My.”

— Ann Patchett

145. “Doy was not my problem to solve but my brother to love.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

147. “Stories are based in conflict, and when the conflict is resolved the story ends. That’s because for the most part happiness is amorphous, wordless, and largely uninteresting.”

— Ann Patchett

148. “It was already in place, without him seeing any of it, the web was spun and snug around the house, and while his first impulse, the natural impulse, was to press ahead anyway and see if he might beat out the odds, clear logic held him.”

— Ann Patchett

149. “I don’t remember ever looking at my mother this way, like I could eat her down to the bone then wipe my bloody mouth on her hair.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett