Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “The general wisdom around here is if you can’t get it at Wal-Mart, you don’t need it.” Sabine looked up at the brown building, which was itself the size of another parking lot. “I’ve never actually been in one of these.” “Go on,” Kitty said. Sabine shook her head. “I’ve just never had any reason to.” Kitty stubbed out her cigarette and replaced her mitten. “Well, you are in for a treat.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

253. “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

254. “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

255. “People with children are attuned to the inherent sexual possibility of an empty house.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

257. “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

258. “About that time I read something Dorothy Day had said. She said what she wanted to do was love the poor, not analyze them, not rehabilitate them. When I read that it was like a light clicking on. I thought about Mrs. Hopwood. I realized that Doy was not my problem to solve but my brother to love. I decided on the spot that I was going to love him and not expect anything from him, and overnight he changed.”

— Ann Patchett

259. “Franny gave her sister a tired smile. “Oh, my love,” she said. “What do the only children do?” “We’ll never have to know,” Caroline said.”

— Ann Patchett

260. “I put on my nightgown and crawl in beside him, covering the hand that covers his heart. Live forever, I say to myself.”

— Ann Patchett

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

266. “Every time I rolled the dice and moved the little iron forward, I thought how lucky I was: city, job, family, house.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

268. “Hard work is first and foremost hard, and whether or not it’s ultimately rewarding is very rarely the thing you’re thinking of at the moment.”

— Ann Patchett

269. “Every generation believes the world is going to end.”

— Ann Patchett

270. “The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money, remember that. You gotta be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what’s going on around you. None of that costs a dime.”

— Ann Patchett

271. “People made her tired. The way they were easy with one another, the way they seemed so natural, only made her sad.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

273. “She shrugged. “I gave up caring where I lived a long time ago, and anyway, I think it’s good for me. It teaches me humility. She teaches me humility.” She tipped her head backwards the way Maeve would do. “You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself. Andrea’s my penance for all the mistakes.”

— Ann Patchett

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

278. “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

279. “I was a writer and nothing else, and to miss seeing me as such was to miss me altogether.”

— Ann Patchett

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “I’ve never believed the women of the world are entitled to leave every one of their options open for a lifetime.”

— Ann Patchett

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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.”

— Ann Patchett

291. “What you have to remember about your mother is that she didn’t have her own character. She turned into whoever she was sitting next to. When.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

293. “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

294. “Everything should stay like this,” she says. I tell her that I wish it could, even though I know she means the temperature of the lake and I mean this summer, everyone home and together. As sad as I am for the suffering of the world, I wish to keep this exact moment, Emily on the beach in my arms.”

— Ann Patchett

295. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

297. “Art is not sin. It’s not always good. But it is not a sin.”

— Ann Patchett

298. “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

299. “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

300. “Influence is a combination of circumstance and luck: what we are shown and what we stumble upon in those brief years when our hearts and minds are fully open.”

— Ann Patchett