Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 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. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

110. “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

111. “Learn to write by writing.”

— Ann Patchett

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

139. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

141. “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

142. “If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say. Write the story, learn from it, put it away, write another story.”

— Ann Patchett

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

147. “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

148. “Why wouldn’t it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view?”

— Ann Patchett

149. “In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.”

— Ann Patchett

150. “You don’t have to,” I tell my daughter. “You want to. You wake up one day and you don’t want the carnival anymore. In fact, you can’t even believe you did that.”

— Ann Patchett