Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It.”

— Ann Patchett

302. “Finally, we reach Yellowstone, which is to Winnebagos what upstream is to salmon.”

— Ann Patchett

303. “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

304. “Chemistry is a beautiful system,” Dr. Able said. “Every block builds on the previous block. If you don’t understand chapter 1, there’s no point in going on to chapter 2. Chapter 1 provides the keys to chapter 2, and chapters 1 and 2 together provide the keys to chapter 3. We’re on chapter 4 now. It isn’t possible to suddenly start working hard on chapter 4 and catch up to the rest of the class. You have no keys.”

— Ann Patchett

305. “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

306. “I see the past as it actually was,” Maeve said. She was looking at the trees. “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 as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”

— Ann Patchett

307. “There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.”

— Ann Patchett

308. “She stopped there, a sudden flush of panic rising up her neck. This was a woman whose biology betrayed her at every turn. Emotions stormed across her face with a flag.”

— Ann Patchett

309. “He’d bought the most beautiful house in Pennsylvania and his wife was looking at him like he’d shot her. We.”

— Ann Patchett

310. “Maybe he was just a decent man. I had started to think.”

— Ann Patchett

311. “But Dr. Rapp had no self-aggrandizing notions about his role in the tribe. He never set himself out to be the great white hero. He never took a single specimen more than what was absolutely needed. He disrupted nothing.”

— Ann Patchett

312. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

314. “People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go. But at seventeen, I didn’t understand, and so I left.”

— Ann Patchett

315. “Until then I’ll keep writing things down, both the things I make up and the things that have happened. It is the way I’ve learned to see my life.”

— Ann Patchett

316. “So was the movie excruciating to watch because nothing was right, or was it excruciating to watch because, impossibly, some things were? Every.”

— Ann Patchett

317. “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

318. “She could read the patterns, knew at a glance a Melas from a Konya, a Ladik from a Sivas. She loved the Ladik.”

— Ann Patchett

319. “He said it in languages he knew he need not include, Serbo-Croation and Cantonese, just because there was comfort in speaking and no one tried to stop him. ‘Stand up,’ is not a message that needed translation in the first place. People are sheep about certain things. When some begin to stand, the rest will follow.”

— Ann Patchett

320. “The children had been happy to see me when I first came through the door the day before but since had discovered that I was the same person they’d always known.”

— Ann Patchett

321. “It’s not more complicated than that,” she said. “That’s all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?” Look.”

— Ann Patchett

322. “Teresa had once thought her husband to be the handsomest man in the world, when in fact he looked like one of those gargoyles perched on a high corner of Notre Dame that’s meant to scare the devil away.”

— Ann Patchett

323. “I promote the books I love tirelessly, because a book can so easily get lost in the mad shuffle of the world and it needs someone with a loud voice to hold it up and praise it. I am that person.”

— Ann Patchett

324. “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

325. “Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn’t it stand to reason that that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view?”

— Ann Patchett

326. “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

327. “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

328. “When we do things differently, and very often we do, I remind myself that it is rarely a matter of right and wrong. We are simply two adults who grew up in different houses far away from one another.”

— Ann Patchett

329. “Fix’s and Bert’s mutual theory that a consistent practice over so many years would result in a perfect score had not been correct. A perfect score on the LSAT is 180. Caroline Keating came in at 177. She didn’t know where she had lost those three points but she never forgave herself for them.”

— Ann Patchett

330. “Putting together a novel is essentially putting together the lives of strangers I’m coming to know. In some ways it’s not unlike putting together my own life. I think I know what I’m doing when in truth I have no idea. I just keep moving forward.”

— Ann Patchett

331. “Sebastian was the one who was necessary. His interest in what we said.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

333. “Everything looks so logical going backwards – Yes, of course, that’s what we did – but going forward it’s something else entirely. Going forward, the lights may as well be off.”

— Ann Patchett

334. “Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?”

— Ann Patchett

335. “And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.”

— Ann Patchett

336. “We had stepped into the river that takes you forward.”

— Ann Patchett

337. “It’s like you don’t want to be dislodged from your suffering.”

— Ann Patchett

338. “I don’t want to wind up some old woman who talks to her rabbit,” she said to Rabbit, who was chewing so furiously he didn’t even bother to lift his head.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

340. “She was as silent as light on the leaves of trees.”

— Ann Patchett

341. “They watched the snow fall and fall and fall until they thought that they were the ones falling.”

— Ann Patchett

342. “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

343. “I found it a comfort to be in the kitchen with her. The stove and the window and Sandy and the clock.”

— Ann Patchett

344. “Neither Doyle nor Sullivan had ever been to visit him at Regina Cleri, and Tip had only come one time and then left after five minutes. To Father Sullivan it was as if this part of his family, these people whom he loved, had all packed up and gone to Africa.”

— Ann Patchett

345. “I had no interest in starting over again, but there are some people whom we grant the role of oracle in our lives and when they speak – rarely, gravely – we are well-advised to listen.”

— Ann Patchett

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “You may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead, that books are dead, that maybe even reading is dead – to which I say, Pull up a chair, friend. I have a story to tell.”

— Ann Patchett

350. “The conversations I had had so often with magazine editors were now internalized. I could read both parts of the script. Did I think that was a beautiful scene I had written? Yes, I did. Did it further the cause of the novel? No, not really. Could I then delete it? It was already gone.”

— Ann Patchett