Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “It’s strange, when you think about all the worry he caused us, that.”

— Ann Patchett

302. “Back then I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to give your whole heart to a baby that isn’t yours.”

— Ann Patchett

303. “Things changed again after that, change being the one constant.”

— Ann Patchett

304. “Conversely, I am now capable of forgetting entire novels that I’ve read, and I’ve been influenced not at all by books I passionately love and would kill to be influenced by. Think about this before you let your child have an iPad.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

306. “Gen, with his genius for languages, was often at a loss for what to say when left with only his own words.”

— Ann Patchett

307. “Grief isn’t something to be gotten through. It has no life of its own like that. It’s just plain and simply there. It’s one of the things which tells us we are humans.”

— Ann Patchett

308. “She had loved Bert Cousins, and then grown used to him, then was disappointed in him, and then later, after he left her with four small children, she had hated him with the full force of her life. But in the airport when she was twenty-two, her love for him had precluded all thoughts of ever not loving him.”

— Ann Patchett

309. “I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.”

— Ann Patchett

310. “She has a point,” Cousins said. He never would have stood back here making sandwiches, though he felt he could use a sandwich, that he wanted one, and so he poured himself another drink.”

— Ann Patchett

311. “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

312. “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

313. “One of us was sleeping and I didn’t know which one of us it was.”

— Ann Patchett

314. “There was no explanation for how the school, which was the major source of misery in their lives, could have been transformed into the most compelling place on earth simply by virtue of its being Saturday. What a difference a day makes, Albie’s.”

— Ann Patchett

315. “Forgiveness was at the heart of everything. Because I could not ask, I could not be forgiven.”

— Ann Patchett

316. “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

317. “Ripley’s announcement that I wasn’t going to be acting on one foot was my first glimpse into the future.”

— Ann Patchett

318. “I don’t think I ever took the train to Philadelphia without thinking of chemistry, and how Morey Able told me that without a solid grasp of chapter 1, chapter 2 would be impossible. Maeve had done that work when our mother came back, gone all the way to the beginning until she was certain she understood what had happened.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

323. “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

324. “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

325. “We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop.”

— Ann Patchett

326. “I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her.”

— Ann Patchett

327. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

329. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

340. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

349. “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

350. “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