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

201. “It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days.”

— Ann Patchett

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

208. “We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

210. “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

211. “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

212. “Forse una vita privata non era un dono che potesse durare per sempre. Forse tutti ne godevano per un po’ e poi passavano il resto della vita nel ricordo.”

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

— Ann Patchett

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.”

— Ann Patchett

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “I grew up in the weather of his insanity, and yet the gifts he gave me are legion.”

— Ann Patchett

224. “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

225. “For the vast majority of the people on this planet,” Fix had said, “the thing that’s going to kill them is already on the inside.”

— Ann Patchett

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

231. “The worst part is understanding you’re going to die.′ She looked at me, her black eyebrows raised. ‘You didn’t understand that?’ I shook my head. ‘You think you understand it. You think that when you’re ninety-six you’ll lie down on the couch after a big Thanksgiving dinner and not wake up, but even then you’re not really sure. Maybe there’ll be some special dispensation for you. Everybody thinks that.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

236. “They said no, she can’t make it. They said everything’s closed. And I said you don’t know Ann.” And then he drifted off to sleep. Explain doubt to me, because at that moment I ceased to understand it. In return I will tell you everything I know about love.”

— Ann Patchett

237. “As every reader knows, the social contract between you and a book you love is not complete until you can hand that book to someone else and say, Here, you’re going to love this.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

239. “Until then I’ll keep writing things down, both the things I make up and the things that have happened. It is the way I’ve learned to see my life.”

— Ann Patchett

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid.”

— Ann Patchett

245. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

247. “I’ll tell you the truth, Dr. Singh, what I have discovered about these trees is not what I expected. It will not be what your pharmaceutical company expects. It is something much greater, much more ambitious than anything we had hoped for. That was Dr. Rapp’s great lesson in the Amazon, in science: Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”

— Ann Patchett

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Ann Patchett