Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Why did my mother leave?”

— Ann Patchett

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “In 1954, money was precious; train tickets and operas were unimaginable things. In a different time, such a production would have seemed too complicated for a child, but this was only a handful of years after the war and children then were much more likely to understand a whole host of things that might seem impossible for children now. They.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

270. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

272. “If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need.”

— Ann Patchett

273. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

275. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

280. “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

281. “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

282. “At the time I didn’t hate her, so why do I scrub out every memory of kindness, or even civility, in favor of the memories of someone being awful?”

— Ann Patchett

283. “It was a victory for all the girls that they remembered not to scream.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

286. “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

287. “After her death, at the age of thirty-nine, I wrote a book about us. I wrote it as a way to memorialize her and mourn her, and as a way of keeping her own important memoir, Autobiography of a Face, alive, even as I had not been able to keep her alive. This was a story of a Herculean effort to endure hardship, and to be a friend. Even when the details of our lives became sordid, it was not the stuff of sewers.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

289. “Because in this moment we always feel that we have fully arrived. We believe we are fair and sensitive, helpful, kind, no longer predatory or racist. But the future will call us out all the same.”

— Ann Patchett

290. “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

291. “Novel writing, I soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea. If I thought too much about how far I’d come or the distance I still had to cover, I’d sink.”

— Ann Patchett

292. “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

293. “Don’t let yourself get upset. People who get upset only make more work.”

— Ann Patchett

294. “What is it you said to me just now? There was a time? Maybe there was a time. To tell you the truth I can’t remember. From where I sit I would tell you that having a child is akin to plotting your own death, but I delivered thousands and thousands of babies in my day and it seemed at least in that moment many of the mothers were happy. I know it wasn’t like this for the young.”Dr. Swenson closed her eyes and though her head stayed balanced and upright she seemed to be asleep.”

— Ann Patchett

295. “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

296. “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

297. “I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me.”

— Ann Patchett

298. “There will always be people there to tell a pretty girl what she should be doing or thinking. At the counter, it’s the pretty girls you can always sell the most to. They never know their minds.” “You.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

300. “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