Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Even though I didn’t know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

111. “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

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. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

123. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “Sometimes that’s where the diamonds are.”

— 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. “Contrary to popular belief, love does not need understanding to thrive.”

— Ann Patchett

141. “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

142. “You’ve got to go through them, dive under just when they’re rising up for you, set your direction, close your eyes, and just swim like hell. Once you get through that, you’ll find there isn’t a better place for swimming because it’s the ocean and it goes on forever. You don’t have to see anyone you don’t want to. If you look out, away from the beach, it’s easy to imagine that there’s no one else but you in the whole world, you and maybe a couple of sea gulls.”

— Ann Patchett

143. “When she came back she gave him a paperback called Commonwealth. “It was a very big deal last year, won the National Book Award, sold through the roof. Do you know it?”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

145. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

149. “Based on my own experience, I believe the brain is as soft and malleable as bread dough when we’re young. I am grateful for every class trip to the symphony I went on and curse any night I was allowed to watch The Brady Bunch, because all of it stuck. Conversely, I am now capable of forgetting entire novels that I’ve read, and I’ve been influenced not at all by books I passionately love and would kill to be influenced by. Think about this before you let your child have an iPad.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett