Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

307. “All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

310. “Though I had been a doctor for only a short time, I knew the havoc the well could unleash upon the sick.”

— Ann Patchett

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

316. “It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.”

— Ann Patchett

317. “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

318. “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

319. “Lucy was invisible, exuberant, and utterly birdlike in her wild, darting freedom.”

— Ann Patchett

320. “Transcendentalist movement?”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

332. “Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.”

— Ann Patchett

333. “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

334. “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

335. “For as many times as the horrible thing happens, a thousand times in every day the horrible thing passes us by.”

— Ann Patchett

336. “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

337. “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

338. “If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need.”

— Ann Patchett

339. “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

340. “What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.”

— Ann Patchett

341. “He wondered now if everyone had a private life. He wondered if his wife had one. It was possible that all those years he had been alone, never knowing that a complete world existed and no one spoke of it.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

343. “Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world’s unhappiness on the advent of calculators.”

— Ann Patchett

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

348. “That’s not possible.” Pallace disagreed. “It’s possible, not optimal.”

— Ann Patchett

349. “She understood in life that a person was only allowed one trip down to hell.”

— Ann Patchett

350. “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