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

252. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “I grew up in the weather of his insanity, and yet the gifts he gave me are legion.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— 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. “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

268. “We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.”

— Ann Patchett

269. “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

270. “What do the only children do?”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

272. “I thought it was just for a while, like you always think something bad is for just a while.”

— Ann Patchett

273. “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

274. “Natalie Posen had chosen to bury her husband in Los Angeles, giving her spite the air of the eternal.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

278. “They said no, she can’t make it. They said everything’s closed. And I said you don’t know Ann.” And then he drifted off to sleep. Explain doubt to me, because at that moment I ceased to understand it. In return I will tell you everything I know about love.”

— Ann Patchett

279. “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

280. “As every reader knows, the social contract between you and a book you love is not complete until you can hand that book to someone else and say, Here, you’re going to love this.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

282. “That is, after all, Robin’s superpower: to love the person in front of her as she is, to see all the glorious light inside them and reflect it back, everywhere.”

— Ann Patchett

283. “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

284. “Maisie’s phone rings. The house rule is no phones at the table but we’ve made an exception for Maisie who keeps getting calls from neighbors asking for help, and we made an exception for Emily so that Benny can text her and tell her what time he’ll be back at the house, and so of course we extended the exception to Nell, because why would we let her sisters answer their phones at the table and make her turn hers off? Joe and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.”

— Ann Patchett

285. “It doesn’t take so long for craving to subside. Once I got the hang of giving something up, it wasn’t much of a trick. The much harder part was living with the startling abundance that had been illuminated when I stopped trying to get more.”

— Ann Patchett

286. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

288. “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

289. “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

290. “I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

295. “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

296. “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

297. “The sick were a ferocious lot. They’d walk right through you if they thought that health was on the other side.”

— Ann Patchett

298. “Karl had been living in our house for twenty-five years. I’d been there for sixteen – the longest I’d ever lived anywhere by more than a decade. Ours was a marriage of like-minded nearness. Karl’s suit jacket went directly onto a hanger. I wiped down the kitchen counters before going to bed. Our never-ending stream of houseguests frequently commented on the tranquility of our surroundings, and I told them the secret was not having much stuff.”

— Ann Patchett

299. “In the summer the pear trees were fine. In the summer, all that is hideous about a pear tree is hidden by leaves and pears. But once those disguises were removed they were nothing but acres of murderous psychopaths emboldened by darkness.”

— Ann Patchett

300. “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