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

152. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

154. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

157. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

159. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “DAs were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit. The.”

— Ann Patchett

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “I have always believed that the desire for revenge is one of life’s great motivators, and my success would be my revenge.”

— Ann Patchett

173. “Franny gave her sister a tired smile. “Oh, my love,” she said. “What do the only children do?” “We’ll never have to know,” Caroline said.”

— Ann Patchett

174. “Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.”

— Ann Patchett

175. “Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women. I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.”

— Ann Patchett

176. “Had the accompanist played so well? It would have been impossible to remember, his talent was to be invisible, to lift the soprano up, but now the people in the living room of the vice-presidential mansion listened to Kato with hunger and nothing in their lives had ever fed them so well.”

— Ann Patchett

177. “I marveled at the resilience of children for their ability to survive their own childhoods with joy.”

— Ann Patchett

178. “It doesn’t take so long for craving to subside. Once I got the hang of giving something up, it wasn’t much of a trick. The much harder part was living with the startling abundance that had been illuminated when I stopped trying to get more.”

— Ann Patchett

179. “Being alone is something you have to be good at to enjoy.”

— Ann Patchett

180. “Their relationship, which had been going on five years, was built on admiration and mutual disbelief. After.”

— Ann Patchett

181. “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

182. “He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence. He could package the place as hell’s interpretation of the Fountain of Youth and make a fortune: just walk in the door and you’re fifteen all over again.”

— Ann Patchett

183. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

185. “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

186. “The problem with being the only woman in a play in which the three other characters were men and the playwright was a man and the director was a man was that no matter what I said, I sounded petulant, female.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “Natalie Posen had chosen to bury her husband in Los Angeles, giving her spite the air of the eternal.”

— Ann Patchett

192. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

194. “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

195. “That is, after all, Robin’s superpower: to love the person in front of her as she is, to see all the glorious light inside them and reflect it back, everywhere.”

— Ann Patchett

196. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

198. “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

199. “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

200. “In those happy dark ages before cell phones and the internet, such miscalculations were solved not by changing the situation but by changing yourself. I put on another sweater and my coat. I.”

— Ann Patchett