Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Days are endless and the weeks fly by.”

— Ann Patchett

352. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

354. “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

355. “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

356. “If my father was no longer there to tell me what kind of man I should be, I still knew what he would have expected.”

— Ann Patchett

357. “It turned out the real heartbreak of the vow of poverty was never being able to buy presents for the people who were so clearly in need.”

— Ann Patchett

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

367. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

372. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

375. “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

376. “You don’t see many shy terrorists.”

— Ann Patchett

377. “Did you ever want to be a writer?” “No,” she said, and she would have told him. “I only wanted to be a reader.”

— Ann Patchett

378. “For twenty-two years Sabine had told her stories to one person, so that the action and the telling had become inseparable. What was left was half a life, the one where she lived it but had nothing later to give shape to the experience.”

— Ann Patchett

379. “I’ve always been a believer in repression.”

— Ann Patchett

380. “If he saw himself as a famous novelist then he would have known she would be there, but if he saw himself as someone she had met in the bar, well, he was right. She.”

— Ann Patchett

381. “But now I know I was simply not cut out for life without her. I am living that life now and would not choose it.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

383. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

386. “We did all the things we should have done while she was still alive.”

— Ann Patchett

387. “You don’t have to like your work to be good at it.”

— Ann Patchett

388. “With Tennessee there to visit, Regina Cleri had been bearable to him, and without her he felt like what he was: a useless old man who had been shelved away to die.”

— Ann Patchett

389. “I may at times forget the details of my life but I remember the stories I read.”

— Ann Patchett

390. “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

391. “Teresa kept sitting.”

— Ann Patchett

392. “Sand, waves, beach roses.”

— Ann Patchett

393. “We had invented time, and we could not kill it fast enough. After dinner, dancing, and baths, we read, wrote our poems and stories, brushed our teeth, and tumbled into bed, only to find the next day was exactly the same. We had not moved one inch forward in the night. It was like prison, not in the punishment but in the vast sameness of the days. We were impossibly rich in time, and we lavished the excess on one another.”

— Ann Patchett

394. “Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in Doyle’s living room asking for the statue back.”

— Ann Patchett

395. “New York represented her shame about things that were in no way her fault.”

— Ann Patchett

396. “The problem, I wanted to say, was that I was asleep to the world.”

— Ann Patchett

397. “You would needle and whine until finally we gave in. Your father and I would try to get you to come to the community hall and look at the quilts and pet the angora rabbits, but you wanted to eat chili corndogs and cotton candy and then get on one of those god-awful rides that had been put together by three heroin addicts with a sprocket wrench, the rides that made you feel like your head was going to be flung off your neck by centrifugal force.”

— Ann Patchett

398. “Lee was in his sixties, his hair gray, his glasses heavy. He had the sunburnt look of a man who took his golf shirts seriously.”

— Ann Patchett

399. “The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, “You have no need for sight. Listen.”

— Ann Patchett

400. “Even the stupidest ideas have resonance once they’ve happened.”

— Ann Patchett