Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “We don’t deserve anything – not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

154. “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

155. “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

156. “Archimedes’ Principle states that any body completely or partially submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force, the magnitude of which is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body. Or to put it another way, you can hold a beach ball under water but the second you stop it’s going to shoot straight back up.”

— Ann Patchett

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “The trick is in the decision to wake up every morning and meet the world again with love.”

— Ann Patchett

166. “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

167. “I was a Catholic shaped by twelve years of Catholic school. Marriage was one of the seven sacraments I had memorized along with my multiplication tables in third grade. Catholicism wasn’t at the heart of marriage for me, but it was part of it. Marriage was one of the sacraments I was entitled to.”

— Ann Patchett

168. “I had a mother who left when I was a child. I didn’t miss her. Maeve was there, with her red coat and her black hair, standing at the bottom of the stairs, the white marble floor with the little black squares, the snow coming down in glittering sheets in the windows behind her, the windows as wide as a movie screen, the ship in the waves of the grandfather clock rocking the minutes away.”

— Ann Patchett

169. “This story – which begins and begins – starts again here.”

— Ann Patchett

170. “I remember complaining one night on the phone to my mother that we spent too much of our time worrying about love and money. “Think of it as research,” she said. “That’s what everybody writes about.”

— Ann Patchett

171. “Don’t let yourself get upset. People who get upset only make more work.”

— Ann Patchett

172. “Then I remembered what my father had told me, that the things we could do nothing about were best put out of our minds.”

— Ann Patchett

173. “At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was going something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all.”

— Ann Patchett

174. “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

175. “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

176. “The point, I wanted to say, was that we shouldn’t still be driving to the Dutch House, and the more we kept up with our hate, the more we were forever doomed to live out our lives in a parked car on VanHoebeek Street.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

178. “I just want her to be one of us, but when you think about saints, I don’t imagine any of them made their families happy.”

— Ann Patchett

179. “You could see just a trace of the daughter there, the way she held her shoulders back, the length of her neck. It was a crime what time did to women.”

— Ann Patchett

180. “Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?”

— Ann Patchett

181. “It’s like you don’t want to be dislodged from your suffering.”

— Ann Patchett

182. “I could have had one life but insteads I had another because of this book my grandmother protected. What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later that extended to the opera, to the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that I attribute to this book.”

— Ann Patchett

183. “When Teresa was told that she had lost summers, she made a point to curse and weep, but she wondered silently if she hadn’t just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation.”

— Ann Patchett

184. “You may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead, that books are dead, that maybe even reading is dead – to which I say, Pull up a chair, friend. I have a story to tell.”

— Ann Patchett

185. “All the things that feel reasonable when you’re trying to be an actress feel unbearable once you’ve stopped.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

187. “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

188. “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

189. “It’s a wonderful thing to find a great teacher, but you also have to find him or her at a time in life when you’re able to listen to, trust, and implement the lessons you receive.”

— Ann Patchett

190. “I loved her even as she was swimming away from me, even as I was hating her. That’s the way it is, when you’ve loved somebody your whole life. It’s like a direction you go in, even when you don’t want to go anymore.”

— Ann Patchett

191. “And what I think is that this belief I had was what ruined everything. That’s the thing that kept me from going out and finding him, this idea that when he was ready he was going to come and find me. That’s the thing I’ve lost, that excitement, the nervousness I had from waiting. So just when I stopped waiting, that’s when you came.”

— Ann Patchett

192. “My sister had the full approval of our father, but that was like having a suitcase full of francs after France joined the eurozone. They were worthless, except to remind you that you used to be rich. She spent a couple of summers sleeping on the floor of the walk-in linen closet to avoid having to share her room with my stepfather’s children.”

— Ann Patchett

193. “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

194. “I could understand why Gautama had to leave his wife and child in order to find the path to nirvana. The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth.”

— Ann Patchett

195. “Like every other mother in the history of time, I wondered if I would ever be able to love another child as much as I loved her.”

— Ann Patchett

196. “We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

198. “If I were taking notes, they would read: I see something. A shape? I have no idea. It’s not exactly the stuff that literary archives are made of.”

— Ann Patchett

199. “Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job.”

— Ann Patchett

200. “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