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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “Because while Leo Posen appeared to be perfectly sober, she would be that he seemed that way regardless of how much he had drunk. Some men were like that. They went from sober to more or less dead without intermediate steps.”

— Ann Patchett

306. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

311. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

315. “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

316. “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

317. “That’s the tricky part about being a saint. If you ever think of yourself as one it throws you out of the running. I’ve known people who thought they were saints, plenty of them, and believe you me, they were anything but.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

320. “Marion and I keep no secret store of love for each other, I will promise you that. Everything that was kind between us we killed with years of dedication and hard work. When I hang up the phone with her now it’s hard to imagine that one tender word has ever passed between us.”

— Ann Patchett

321. “Zen- Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thu but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers.”

— Ann Patchett

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “What do the only children do?”

— Ann Patchett

326. “In my family, there were happy Thanksgivings and tolerable Easters, but Christmas was a holiday we failed at with real vigor.”

— Ann Patchett

327. “Cal!′ Beverly called out over the crowd... But Cal looked back at her as if it were some weird coincidence that his name was Cal and this complete stranger had said something to someone who was also named Cal. He turned away. Jeanette stood just beside her, looking at the strap of her little shoulder bad, staring at it. Had anyone had this child tested?”

— Ann Patchett

328. “Transcendentalist movement?”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

330. “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

331. “It sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.”

— Ann Patchett

332. “Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don’t you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world’s greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.”

— Ann Patchett

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “She put no stock in dreams. To her they were just a television left on in another room.”

— Ann Patchett

338. “In that way the accident was like his mother’s death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different intervals but always there. It happened in the past and it was always happening. It happened every single minute of the day.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

340. “I carried him around for years, but one day, I don’t know, I put him down. I didn’t dream about him anymore. I didn’t think what he’d want for lunch every time I got lunch, I didn’t look at the guy riding next to me in the car and think about who he wasn’t. I felt guilty about that but I have to tell you, it was a relief.”

— Ann Patchett

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

346. “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time.”

— Ann Patchett

347. “The sound he was making was the sound Cal had made right before he died, that same high-pitched whistling that was, if not the opposite of breathing, at least the very end of breathing. “It’s.”

— Ann Patchett

348. “Like any other monkey on your back, no addiction ever feels complete until you can pass it on to your friends.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

350. “Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you’re not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?”

— Ann Patchett