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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “The future is not one thing. So many possibilities can arise as a result of intelligence, education, curiosity, and hard work. No one ever told me that, and I’m sorry it took this long for me to figure it out.”

— Ann Patchett

257. “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

258. “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

259. “It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days.”

— Ann Patchett

260. “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

261. “To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you’d never do it, so if I went back I would never be able to leave again. Now that I knew what leaving meant.”

— Ann Patchett

262. “I loved her even as she was swimming away from me, even as I was hating her. That’s the way it is, when you’ve loved somebody your whole life. It’s like a direction you go in, even when you don’t want to go anymore.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

264. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

266. “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

267. “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

268. “Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found.”

— Ann Patchett

269. “French wine was the cornerstone of French diplomacy. They handed it out like peppermints.”

— Ann Patchett

270. “Girls and their dates still got dressed to go to the Apollo for amateur night but by 1968 pretty much every representation of hope in the country had been put up against a wall and shot.”

— Ann Patchett

271. “How was I supposed to get through Easter without her?”

— Ann Patchett

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “He couldn’t help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. “Is.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

277. “He wondered sometimes if it was love or just a lack of rest that had twisted such a longing in his heart.”

— Ann Patchett

278. “Maybe once he wished I was his daughter, because it was plain that my news was hard for him to hear.”

— 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. “Everybody likes Anders. But if Vogel.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

283. “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

284. “For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

286. “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

287. “MOST OF THE writers and artists I know were made for sheltering in place. The world asks us to engage, and for the most part we can, but given the choice, we’d rather stay home.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

289. “He’d told her she wouldn’t have to do anything but lie on the big down sofa in the front room and read all day, or she could ride her bike to the beach and read.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

291. “She took it all in, and as the stories of the past unfolded she had nothing but sympathy for me. Celeste wasn’t wondering why I had taken so long to tell her about my life, she took the fact that I was telling her now as proof of my love.”

— Ann Patchett

292. “Writing must not be compartmentalized. You don’t step outside of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life. And who you were as a mother, a teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person... People ask me if writing can be taught, and yes, I can teach you to write a better sentence, to construct dialogue, to develop a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say.”

— Ann Patchett

293. “I’m not company. I’m your mother.” She said it lightly.”

— 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. “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

296. “If my father was no longer there to tell me what kind of man I should be, I still knew what he would have expected.”

— Ann Patchett

297. “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

298. “No one should have so much money that they could own a house like that and then not even bother to live in it.”

— Ann Patchett

299. “You learn things about characters as you write them, so even if you think you know where things are heading, don’t set it in stone; you might change your mind. You have to let the action progress the way it must, not the way you want it to. You create an order for the universe and then you set that universe in motion.”

— Ann Patchett

300. “Crazy is another sloppy word, like rich. It’s all a matter of reference.”

— Ann Patchett