Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “You could see just a trace of the daughter there, the way she held her shoulders back, the length of her neck. It was a crime what time did to women.”

— Ann Patchett

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

263. “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

264. “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

265. “That’s the tricky part about being a saint. If you ever think of yourself as one it throws you out of the running. I’ve known people who thought they were saints, plenty of them, and believe you me, they were anything but.”

— Ann Patchett

266. “Nell is a girl without secrets. Watching her face is like going to a movie.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

268. “There’s no protecting anyone,” Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. “Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.”

— Ann Patchett

269. “Zen- Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thu but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers.”

— Ann Patchett

270. “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

271. “Had they thought for a minute that things might turn out the way they did they never would have had the courage to begin.”

— Ann Patchett

272. “What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.”

— Ann Patchett

273. “What do the only children do?”

— Ann Patchett

274. “In my family, there were happy Thanksgivings and tolerable Easters, but Christmas was a holiday we failed at with real vigor.”

— Ann Patchett

275. “Cal!′ Beverly called out over the crowd... But Cal looked back at her as if it were some weird coincidence that his name was Cal and this complete stranger had said something to someone who was also named Cal. He turned away. Jeanette stood just beside her, looking at the strap of her little shoulder bad, staring at it. Had anyone had this child tested?”

— Ann Patchett

276. “Transcendentalist movement?”

— Ann Patchett

277. “The warm air smelled like popcorn and Coke. It smelled like a carnival wearing new clothes.”

— Ann Patchett

278. “It sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.”

— Ann Patchett

279. “Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don’t you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world’s greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.”

— Ann Patchett

280. “You keep someone always for what he or she is worth to you, for what you can trade her for, money or freedom or somebody else you want more. Any person can be a kind of trading chip when you find a way to hold her.”

— Ann Patchett

281. “I decided I was going to make up a novel, and that the novel was going to get me out of the restaurant. The novel was going to be my getaway car.”

— Ann Patchett

282. “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

283. “But in her day, Emily had been a beast, a teenage girl so riven with hormones and rage that her two younger sisters decided it would be easier to just be good. Emily had raised sufficient hell for all of them put together.”

— Ann Patchett

284. “She put no stock in dreams. To her they were just a television left on in another room.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

287. “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

288. “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

289. “Most days now I have a headache and I worry that some tiny Amazonian animal is eating a hole through my cerebral cortex, and the only thing I want in the world, the only thing that would give meaning or sense to this existence, would be the chance to lay my head in your lap. You would put your hand in my hair, I know you would do that for me. Such is your bravery, such is my good fortune.”

— Ann Patchett

290. “Other CEOs were shown fly-fishing in Scottish rivers or piloting their own Learjets into Helsinki. Mr. Hosokawa was photographed at home in the leather chair he sat in when he listened, a Nansei EX-12 stereo system behind him.”

— Ann Patchett

291. “No matter how many years ago I’d stopped playing Emily, she is still here. All of Grover’s Corners is in me.”

— Ann Patchett

292. “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time.”

— Ann Patchett

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

297. “You’re not a mushroom who popped up after a rain. You have parents.”

— Ann Patchett

298. “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

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. “So I’ve come to Chicago to have a drink,” he said. “I’m living in Iowa City for now. Have you ever been to Iowa City?” “I.”

— Ann Patchett