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

152. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

160. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

182. “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

183. “There would never been an end to all the things I wished I’d asked my father. After so many years I thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I’d been not to try harder.”

— Ann Patchett

184. “People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say.”

— Ann Patchett

185. “I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.”

— Ann Patchett

186. “I was still in high school when I decided I didn’t want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my mind.”

— Ann Patchett

187. “She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but.”

— Ann Patchett

188. “She told the woman to go to one of the online agent sites that list agents who are looking for new clients, and then follow their submission guidelines to the letter. If they ask for a twenty-page writing sample, do not send in twenty-two pages.”

— Ann Patchett

189. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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