Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Cancer really was the devil’s handshake.”

— Ann Patchett

202. “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

203. “All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear.”

— Ann Patchett

204. “He had never sought her out or made himself to be anything more than any other member of the audience. He did not assume his appreciation for her talent exceeded anyone else’s. He was more inclined to believe that only a fool would not feel about her exactly how he felt. There was nothing more to want than the privilege to sit and listen.”

— Ann Patchett

205. “One person’s endured lechery was another person’s cherished summer affair.”

— Ann Patchett

206. “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

207. “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

208. “No one could see her objectively anyway. Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing. Found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and so poured like light though her skin. Then all that could be seen was the weight and the gloss of her hair and the pale pink of her cheeks and her beautiful hands.”

— Ann Patchett

209. “Back then I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to give your whole heart to a baby that isn’t yours.”

— Ann Patchett

210. “Things changed again after that, change being the one constant.”

— Ann Patchett

211. “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

212. “Everybody likes Anders. But if Vogel.”

— Ann Patchett

213. “I decided I was going to make up a novel, and that the novel was going to get me out of the restaurant. The novel was going to be my getaway car.”

— Ann Patchett

214. “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

215. “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

216. “There’s no protecting anyone,” Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. “Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.”

— Ann Patchett

217. “Zen- Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thu but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers.”

— Ann Patchett

218. “She has a point,” Cousins said. He never would have stood back here making sandwiches, though he felt he could use a sandwich, that he wanted one, and so he poured himself another drink.”

— Ann Patchett

219. “Because while Leo Posen appeared to be perfectly sober, she would be that he seemed that way regardless of how much he had drunk. Some men were like that. They went from sober to more or less dead without intermediate steps.”

— Ann Patchett

220. “That is one thing I’ve learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it’s pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.”

— Ann Patchett

221. “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

222. “Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you’re not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?”

— Ann Patchett

223. “Like any other monkey on your back, no addiction ever feels complete until you can pass it on to your friends.”

— Ann Patchett

224. “Lucy was invisible, exuberant, and utterly birdlike in her wild, darting freedom.”

— Ann Patchett

225. “All you have to do,” he tells me, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have.”

— Ann Patchett

226. “The warm air smelled like popcorn and Coke. It smelled like a carnival wearing new clothes.”

— Ann Patchett

227. “Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world’s unhappiness on the advent of calculators.”

— Ann Patchett

228. “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

229. “Celeste was plenty happy in those days, though in retrospect she was the ultimate victim of bad timing, thinking that because she was good in chemistry she should marry a doctor instead of becoming a doctor herself. Had she come along a few years later she might have missed that trap altogether.”

— Ann Patchett

230. “It’s strange, when you think about all the worry he caused us, that.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

232. “There would never been an end to all the things I wished I’d asked my father.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

234. “She did have friends, she had just made a decision to stay home and experiment with dying.”

— Ann Patchett

235. “How much sadness could be averted by taking the time to notice all the people we have come to ignore? Would we in fact be safer and not more at risk if we asked someone to voice his feelings rather than wait until he looked for other means of making himself heard?”

— Ann Patchett

236. “She had loved Bert Cousins, and then grown used to him, then was disappointed in him, and then later, after he left her with four small children, she had hated him with the full force of her life. But in the airport when she was twenty-two, her love for him had precluded all thoughts of ever not loving him.”

— Ann Patchett

237. “It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.”

— Ann Patchett

238. “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

239. “I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her.”

— Ann Patchett

240. “The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it.”

— Ann Patchett

241. “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

242. “No anger could survive this, at least no anger I’d ever had.”

— Ann Patchett

243. “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

244. “Forgiveness was at the heart of everything. Because I could not ask, I could not be forgiven.”

— Ann Patchett

245. “Would it be the worst thing in the world if nothing happened at all, if they all stayed together in this generous house? Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.”

— Ann Patchett

246. “Days are endless and the weeks fly by.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

248. “Though I had been a doctor for only a short time, I knew the havoc the well could unleash upon the sick.”

— Ann Patchett

249. “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

250. “Minnesota! It smelled like raspberries and sunlight and tender grass. It was summer and everything was more beautiful than any picture she had carried with her... There had never been a place in the world as beautiful as Minnesota.”

— Ann Patchett