Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

360. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “They said no, she can’t make it. They said everything’s closed. And I said you don’t know Ann.” And then he drifted off to sleep. Explain doubt to me, because at that moment I ceased to understand it. In return I will tell you everything I know about love.”

— Ann Patchett

367. “Franny brushed the snow off her shoulders and made her way to the rented SUV. She had never told that story to Leo. She had meant to but then for some reason she decided to hold it back. Now she understood that at some point far out in the future there would be a night just like tonight, and she would remember this story and know that no one else in the world knew it had happened except Albie. She had needed to keep something for herself.”

— Ann Patchett

368. “I dug my face into the pillow. I was waking up and I did not want to wake up.”

— Ann Patchett

369. “He realized then what he had known from the first minute he saw her, from when she leaned out the kitchen door and called for her husband. This was the start of his life.”

— Ann Patchett

370. “The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as “the stripper soundtrack”: Boom chicka-boom, boom-boom chicka-boom. When their mother stopped walking the soundtrack stopped. If she took a single step it was accompanied by Albie saying only “boom” in a voice that was weirdly sexual for a six-year-old.”

— Ann Patchett

371. “But Dr. Rapp had no self-aggrandizing notions about his role in the tribe. He never set himself out to be the great white hero. He never took a single specimen more than what was absolutely needed. He disrupted nothing.”

— Ann Patchett

372. “Until then I’ll keep writing things down, both the things I make up and the things that have happened. It is the way I’ve learned to see my life.”

— Ann Patchett

373. “He said it in languages he knew he need not include, Serbo-Croation and Cantonese, just because there was comfort in speaking and no one tried to stop him. ‘Stand up,’ is not a message that needed translation in the first place. People are sheep about certain things. When some begin to stand, the rest will follow.”

— Ann Patchett

374. “It’s not more complicated than that,” she said. “That’s all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?” Look.”

— Ann Patchett

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “She was shocked by how bad he looked. Cancer really was the devil’s handshake.”

— Ann Patchett

379. “The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.”

— Ann Patchett

380. “To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid.”

— Ann Patchett

381. “If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, “I’ll be playing in Carnegie Hall next month!” you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to The New Yorker.”

— Ann Patchett

382. “It must be a comfort, having them with you,” Andrea said to him, not of his children but of his paintings.”

— Ann Patchett

383. “The parents napped like febrile toddlers.”

— Ann Patchett

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open.”

— Ann Patchett

388. “Celeste and I had made a few halfhearted attempts to get the kids to church when they were young, and then we gave up and left them in bed. In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of The Nutcracker.”

— Ann Patchett

389. “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

390. “We set off walking backwards, thumbs out, trying to hitchhike to the postoperative breast augmentation appointment, perhaps a first in the state of Iowa.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

392. “Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval.”

— Ann Patchett

393. “Had she done something with her life no one would be asking her to make them cappuccino, and had she done something with her life she would be perfectly happy to make them cappuccino, because it would not be her job. She would make the coffee because she was a gracious and helpful person.”

— Ann Patchett

394. “Were I to die, I’d be taking the entire world of my novel with me – no significant loss to literature, sure, but the thought of losing all the souls inside me was unbearable.”

— Ann Patchett

395. “In life, time runs along in its sameness, but in.”

— Ann Patchett

396. “The root system changes the acidity level in the soil so that nothing much will grow here except for the trees and a little bit of grass. In a sense you could say the tree poisons the area it inhabits to make sure that nothing else will survive in its space and take the nutrients out of the soil or grow taller and block out the sunlight.”

— Ann Patchett

397. “She ate from my plates and wore my clothes and slept in my bed like Goldilocks while the benevolent, lumbering bear went south for the holidays.”

— Ann Patchett

398. “If we could learn everything we needed to know about writing fiction by seeing it masterfully executed, we could just stay in bed and read Chekhov.”

— Ann Patchett

399. “For that withholding, the room sent up a grateful round of laughter. From a distance, I heard someone ask Maeve if she was a doctor as well. “No,” she said, holding up her fork speared with green beans. “I’m in vegetables.”

— Ann Patchett

400. “There was nothing wrong with the house really, other than it was too small: tiny closets, one bathroom. “I don’t care how rich you are, you can only use one bathroom at a time,” Maeve said.”

— Ann Patchett