Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

203. “No, you don’t look at the cigarette, you look at me. When you light a cigarette you have to look the person in the eyes.”

— Ann Patchett

204. “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

205. “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

206. “It was a time in my life when a Junior Mint could mean the difference between happiness and unhappiness.”

— Ann Patchett

207. “I like the Catholic Church,” she says to me sometimes. “Good thing,” I say, which always makes her laugh. I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible: bringing soup to the sick; visiting the widowed husbands of her friends who have died; sticking with the children who are slow to learn and teaching them how to.”

— Ann Patchett

208. “I’d never been in the position of getting my head around what I’d been given. I only understood what I’d lost.”

— Ann Patchett

209. “Every generation believes the world is going to end.”

— Ann Patchett

210. “We were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.”

— Ann Patchett

211. “Sandy shook her head. “Boys,” she said, and with that single word excused me from all responsibility.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

213. “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

214. “Field after field after field, and not an inch of space wasted on something as decorative and meaningless as a tree. “You’ve.”

— Ann Patchett

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

218. “Then I remembered what my father had told me, that the things we could do nothing about were best put out of our minds. I gave it a try and found that it was easier than I imagined.”

— Ann Patchett

219. “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

220. “Tales grow tall in Mississippi, a byproduct of humidity and heat.”

— Ann Patchett

221. “He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person. Never had he received such kindness. Maybe the private life wasn’t forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spend the rest of their lives remembering.”

— Ann Patchett

222. “There are rivers, hundreds of them, running underground all the time, and because of this a man can say he is walking on water.”

— Ann Patchett

223. “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

224. “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

225. “Listen, there’s no sense wondering about your mother. Everybody’s got a burden in life and this is yours. She’s gone. You have to live with that.”

— Ann Patchett

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “What you have to remember about your mother is that she didn’t have her own character. She turned into whoever she was sitting next to. When.”

— Ann Patchett

230. “Someday we’ll look back on all of this and we won’t even believe we were here,” she whispered. “We’ll say, ‘Do you remember when we used to live in Iowa?‘” I smiled, warm, already falling back to sleep. I told her, “We’ll say, ‘That happened during the Iowa years.”

— Ann Patchett

231. “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

232. “Always remember, any book you haven’t read is still a new book.”

— Ann Patchett

233. “My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That’s why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.”

— Ann Patchett

234. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

236. “I feel sort of like I should talk to a psychologist or something about it, but they don’t do stuff like that here, there is no local friendly community health center; you have to ask your GP, who’d send you round the local loony bin for a consultation, and since they’re really big on drugs here, you’d probably just walk out with a prescription.”

— Ann Patchett

237. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

239. “I thought it was just for a while, like you always think something bad is for just a while.”

— Ann Patchett

240. “We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.”

— Ann Patchett

241. “When I hear Roxane sing I am still able to think well of the world,” Gen said. “This is a world in which she can still sing that music with so much compassion. That’s proof of something, isn’t it?”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

243. “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

244. “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

245. “She was in her room, sitting on the window seat with her long legs straight out in front of her. She had a book in her lap but she wasn’t reading it, she was looking out at the garden. The room was angled to the west while not facing west directly, and the way the last bit of light fell over her, she looked like a painting.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

247. “Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.”

— Ann Patchett

248. “Sometimes you don’t realize what’s lacking in life until you find it.”

— Ann Patchett

249. “Until that minute I never realized the extent to which I carried this fear with me everywhere, every minute of my life.”

— Ann Patchett

250. “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