Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Being alone is something you have to be good at to enjoy.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

258. “I carried him around for years, but one day, I don’t know, I put him down. I didn’t dream about him anymore. I didn’t think what he’d want for lunch every time I got lunch, I didn’t look at the guy riding next to me in the car and think about who he wasn’t. I felt guilty about that but I have to tell you, it was a relief.”

— Ann Patchett

259. “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

260. “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

261. “I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.”

— Ann Patchett

262. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

264. “I promote the books I love tirelessly, because a book can so easily get lost in the mad shuffle of the world and it needs someone with a loud voice to hold it up and praise it. I am that person.”

— Ann Patchett

265. “French wine was the cornerstone of French diplomacy. They handed it out like peppermints.”

— Ann Patchett

266. “Girls and their dates still got dressed to go to the Apollo for amateur night but by 1968 pretty much every representation of hope in the country had been put up against a wall and shot.”

— Ann Patchett

267. “How was I supposed to get through Easter without her?”

— Ann Patchett

268. “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

269. “The sound he was making was the sound Cal had made right before he died, that same high-pitched whistling that was, if not the opposite of breathing, at least the very end of breathing. “It’s.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

271. “He couldn’t help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. “Is.”

— Ann Patchett

272. “That’s why you can eat cheesecake,′ she said, and sighed. ‘Because you don’t. That’s the way it works.”

— Ann Patchett

273. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

276. “Conversely, I am now capable of forgetting entire novels that I’ve read, and I’ve been influenced not at all by books I passionately love and would kill to be influenced by. Think about this before you let your child have an iPad.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

279. “Gen, with his genius for languages, was often at a loss for what to say when left with only his own words.”

— Ann Patchett

280. “Grief isn’t something to be gotten through. It has no life of its own like that. It’s just plain and simply there. It’s one of the things which tells us we are humans.”

— Ann Patchett

281. “They had all become characters in the worst part of a fairy tale.”

— Ann Patchett

282. “Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found.”

— Ann Patchett

283. “One of us was sleeping and I didn’t know which one of us it was.”

— Ann Patchett

284. “There was no explanation for how the school, which was the major source of misery in their lives, could have been transformed into the most compelling place on earth simply by virtue of its being Saturday. What a difference a day makes, Albie’s.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

287. “Maybe once he wished I was his daughter, because it was plain that my news was hard for him to hear.”

— Ann Patchett

288. “Writing must not be compartmentalized. You don’t step outside of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life. And who you were as a mother, a teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person... People ask me if writing can be taught, and yes, I can teach you to write a better sentence, to construct dialogue, to develop a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say.”

— Ann Patchett

289. “I’m not company. I’m your mother.” She said it lightly.”

— Ann Patchett

290. “She was not one to set her teeth so far into something that she couldn’t let go when presented with the truth.”

— Ann Patchett

291. “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

292. “If my father was no longer there to tell me what kind of man I should be, I still knew what he would have expected.”

— Ann Patchett

293. “It turned out the real heartbreak of the vow of poverty was never being able to buy presents for the people who were so clearly in need.”

— Ann Patchett

294. “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

295. “For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable.”

— Ann Patchett

296. “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

297. “I see the past as it actually was,” Maeve said. She was looking at the trees. “But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”

— Ann Patchett

298. “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

299. “Those were lean years for emotional charity...”

— Ann Patchett

300. “Once you decide that strangers are more than just dangerous accidents waiting to happen, you will find yourself able to listen. 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