Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “The kitchen was at the back of the house and there was a window over the sink. Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink. “My.”

— Ann Patchett

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

256. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open.”

— Ann Patchett

266. “All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All.”

— Ann Patchett

267. “Celeste and I had made a few halfhearted attempts to get the kids to church when they were young, and then we gave up and left them in bed. In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of The Nutcracker.”

— Ann Patchett

268. “It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they’d wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness. The.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

270. “After years of living in response to the past, we had somehow miraculously become unstuck, moving forward in time.”

— Ann Patchett

271. “Boys at Columbia went to class and boys in Harlem went to war, a reality not suspended for a friendly Saturday pick-up game.”

— Ann Patchett

272. “You’d push a towel under the door so none of the light got out,” Maeve said. “It’s funny, but somehow I had it in my mind that light was rationed, everything was rationed so we couldn’t let the light we weren’t using just pour out on the floor. We had to keep it all in the closet with us.”

— Ann Patchett

273. “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

274. “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

275. “Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand.”

— Ann Patchett

276. “We set off walking backwards, thumbs out, trying to hitchhike to the postoperative breast augmentation appointment, perhaps a first in the state of Iowa.”

— Ann Patchett

277. “Ruben gave him a silver serving.”

— Ann Patchett

278. “Fix looked at his watch, a Girard-Perregaux, a much nicer watch than a cop might be wearing. It.”

— Ann Patchett

279. “She didn’t even think about the drive. She was from Los Angeles; driving was simply part of it.”

— Ann Patchett

280. “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.”

— Ann Patchett

281. “And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against.”

— Ann Patchett

282. “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

283. “There was no embarrassment there, only peace, only enough time left to ask for one more favor, which Franny thought was the deepest difference between women and men. His.”

— Ann Patchett

284. “Had she done something with her life no one would be asking her to make them cappuccino, and had she done something with her life she would be perfectly happy to make them cappuccino, because it would not be her job. She would make the coffee because she was a gracious and helpful person.”

— Ann Patchett

285. “Any configuration of luxury seen from a distance felt like a window on my youth.”

— Ann Patchett

286. “Were I to die, I’d be taking the entire world of my novel with me – no significant loss to literature, sure, but the thought of losing all the souls inside me was unbearable.”

— Ann Patchett

287. “He would say he was finally free of his desire, and then that desire would come over him again like some sort of malarial fever.”

— Ann Patchett

288. “In life, time runs along in its sameness, but in.”

— Ann Patchett

289. “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

290. “You don’t have to like your work to be good at it.”

— Ann Patchett

291. “I leaned over and kissed them both on the forehead, one and then the other. It cost me nothing.”

— Ann Patchett

292. “An essential element of being a writer is learning whom to listen to and whom to ignore where your work is concerned. Every.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

294. “With Tennessee there to visit, Regina Cleri had been bearable to him, and without her he felt like what he was: a useless old man who had been shelved away to die.”

— Ann Patchett

295. “But in that way life works, once I was off the hook it was easy to make the decision to go.”

— Ann Patchett

296. “I may at times forget the details of my life but I remember the stories I read.”

— Ann Patchett

297. “The room was dark except for the light of her phone. She picked it up, even though nothing good ever came from answering the phone in the middle of the night. “Hello?” Franny said.”

— Ann Patchett

298. “Marion and I keep no secret store of love for each other, I will promise you that. Everything that was kind between us we killed with years of dedication and hard work. When I hang up the phone with her now it’s hard to imagine that one tender word has ever passed between us.”

— Ann Patchett

299. “Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.”

— Ann Patchett

300. “Teresa kept sitting.”

— Ann Patchett