Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you’d never do it, so if I went back I would never be able to leave again. Now that I knew what leaving meant.”

— Ann Patchett

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

209. “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

210. “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

211. “You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself.”

— Ann Patchett

212. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

214. “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

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. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “Maisie’s phone rings. The house rule is no phones at the table but we’ve made an exception for Maisie who keeps getting calls from neighbors asking for help, and we made an exception for Emily so that Benny can text her and tell her what time he’ll be back at the house, and so of course we extended the exception to Nell, because why would we let her sisters answer their phones at the table and make her turn hers off? Joe and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.”

— Ann Patchett

238. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

240. “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

241. “The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation.”

— Ann Patchett

242. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

244. “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

245. “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

246. “I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

250. “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