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

351. “Boys at Columbia went to class and boys in Harlem went to war, a reality not suspended for a friendly Saturday pick-up game.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

353. “So I’ve come to Chicago to have a drink,” he said. “I’m living in Iowa City for now. Have you ever been to Iowa City?” “I.”

— Ann Patchett

354. “It’s strange, when you think about all the worry he caused us, that.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

357. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

362. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

367. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

370. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “I changed along with it. Anything I thought I couldn’t do turned out to be something I managed fine.”

— Ann Patchett

380. “Time applied equaled work completed. I.”

— Ann Patchett

381. “We could sit here all night talking about cancer. I’m just telling you it’s unsettling. There are thousands of ways your body can go off the rails for no reason whatsoever and chances are you won’t know about any of it until it’s too late.”

— Ann Patchett

382. “She didn’t know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.”

— Ann Patchett

383. “I had to wait until the thought of not telling you was worse than the thought of telling you. Does.”

— Ann Patchett

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “Funnily enough, this turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.”

— Ann Patchett

388. “He dove down into the bottle of tequila, dove down into the glittering lake, then swam back up, breaking the surface with the full force of his life.”

— Ann Patchett

389. “The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side.”

— Ann Patchett

390. “I almost never got to an answer before Maeve did but in this case it was perfectly obvious. “Because the mother wasn’t there.” If there had been a woman in the apartment he never would have put himself in the middle of things. Mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than Maeve.”

— Ann Patchett

391. “Prosecutors should insist the trials of murderers and drug lords be held in economy class on crowded transatlantic flights, where any suspect would confess to any crime in exchange for the promise of a soft bed in a dark, quiet room.”

— Ann Patchett

392. “New York represented her shame about things that were in no way her fault, or at least that’s what I was thinking.”

— Ann Patchett

393. “I still don’t understand this,” Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. “How did he wind up with my life?” “It isn’t your life,” Leo said. “That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s my imagination.”

— Ann Patchett

394. “When I go down the hall and find Maisie and Nell asleep in their twin beds, I see them both as they are and as they were: grown women and little girls.”

— Ann Patchett

395. “It was like that for the rest of the summer. It was like that every summer the six of them were together. Not that the days were always fun, most of them weren’t, but they did things, real things, and they never got caught.”

— Ann Patchett

396. “She meant both the famous actor and a young man I’d known a hundred years ago, the one who hadn’t crossed my mind in such a long time. The two of them died together.”

— Ann Patchett

397. “They had never been anywhere else. They had never wanted to be anywhere else.”

— Ann Patchett

398. “Your guilt’s got nothing on my guilt,” Franny said. “Your guilt isn’t even in the ballpark.”

— Ann Patchett

399. “Every time I rolled the dice and moved the little iron forward, I thought how lucky I was: city, job, family, house.”

— Ann Patchett

400. “Fix looked at his watch, a Girard-Perregaux, a much nicer watch than a cop might be wearing. It.”

— Ann Patchett