Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Those were lean years for emotional charity...”

— Ann Patchett

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “There will always be people there to tell a pretty girl what she should be doing or thinking. At the counter, it’s the pretty girls you can always sell the most to. They never know their minds.” “You.”

— Ann Patchett

311. “That’s why you can eat cheesecake,′ she said, and sighed. ‘Because you don’t. That’s the way it works.”

— Ann Patchett

312. “I like the Catholic Church,” she says to me sometimes. “Good thing,” I say, which always makes her laugh. I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible: bringing soup to the sick; visiting the widowed husbands of her friends who have died; sticking with the children who are slow to learn and teaching them how to.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

314. “Wearing shoes in the house was barbaric. There was almost as much indignity in wearing shoes in the house as there was in being kidnapped.”

— Ann Patchett

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

326. “Always remember, any book you haven’t read is still a new book.”

— Ann Patchett

327. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

329. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

331. “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

332. “I am fifty-seven. I am twenty-four.”

— Ann Patchett

333. “Bears prevented me from wandering off. Rain prevented me from reading on the shore. Mosquitoes prevented everything else.”

— Ann Patchett

334. “The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times.”

— Ann Patchett

335. “I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

337. “His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were old enough to be members of a terrorist organization.”

— Ann Patchett

338. “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

339. “Maybe he was concerned, or bored, or inappropriately friendly, or midwestern friendly.”

— Ann Patchett

340. “The great love of his life, after God, lived only in dark vinyl.”

— Ann Patchett

341. “His heart woke him up to remind him that in life there was never a limitless number of nights. The.”

— Ann Patchett

342. “She was in her room, sitting on the window seat with her long legs straight out in front of her. She had a book in her lap but she wasn’t reading it, she was looking out at the garden. The room was angled to the west while not facing west directly, and the way the last bit of light fell over her, she looked like a painting.”

— Ann Patchett

343. “Life could very well be lived out in that spot. She tried to remember her aggressiveness, all the things the Generals had taught her in training, but it was one thing to take what you must for the good of the people and quite another to ask for something for yourself. She knew nothing at all about asking.”

— Ann Patchett

344. “I slept like his sister would have, without trouble or dreams.”

— Ann Patchett

345. “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

346. “People simultaneously wanted to kill them, believed that they had almost killed them, and were afraid of being killed by them.”

— Ann Patchett

347. “I have never in my life known a writer who enjoyed the actual act of writing less than Lucy, which is saying something because just about every writer I know sits down to work with some degree of dread.”

— Ann Patchett

348. “To list the things I didn’t ask my father about would be to list the stars in heaven, so let me throw out one: I did not ask my father about women. Not women in general and what you were supposed to do with them, and definitely not women in the particular: my mother, my sister, Andrea.”

— Ann Patchett

349. “You wouldn’t believe all the nice people I’ve met at chemotherapy,” she.”

— Ann Patchett

350. “The distance between me and annihilation was the width of a snowflake.”

— Ann Patchett