Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “This will never be me. I took comfort in that.”

— Ann Patchett

354. “The problem wasn’t mine, after all, it was hers. Celeste had her heart set on marrying a doctor.”

— Ann Patchett

355. “Smoking was what we did at Choate in lieu of taking.”

— Ann Patchett

356. “Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not unlike seeing tigers at the zoo.”

— Ann Patchett

357. “Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable.”

— Ann Patchett

358. “The problem, I wanted to say, was that I was asleep to the world. Even in my own house I had no idea what was going on.”

— Ann Patchett

359. “The art of writing comes way down the line, as does the art of interpreting Bach. Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.”

— Ann Patchett

360. “He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence.”

— Ann Patchett

361. “Maeve had a stack of Henry James novels on her bedside table. The Turn of the Screw? Was that what they wanted?”

— Ann Patchett

362. “Lelia gave a dharma talk about letting go of self-definition: I can’t do this because of what happened to me in my childhood; I can’t do that because I am very shy; I could never go there because I’m afraid of clowns or mushrooms or polar bears. The group gave a gentle, collective laugh of self-recognition. Teresa found the talk helpful, as she had been having an extended interior dialogue during meditation about how septuagenarians from Torrance were fundamentally unsuited for Buddhism.”

— Ann Patchett

363. “He patted their heads like drums. He patted them with a beat.”

— Ann Patchett

364. “It was an awful thing to never really have the chance to hold somebody until she was dead.”

— Ann Patchett

365. “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

366. “In the summers they wandered out of the civilized world and into the early orphanage scenes of Oliver Twist.”

— Ann Patchett

367. “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

368. “You’re hardly even in the book.” Caroline laughed. “Maybe that’s what irritated me about it. Anyway, if I was going to sue I’d make it a class-action case, get the whole family involved.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

371. “To have a child and neglect her in favor of a novel would be cruel, but to simply skip the child in favor of a novel was to avoid harm altogether.”

— Ann Patchett

372. “The early years he had spent building Nansei were like a hurricane in his memory, a huge, overbearing wind into which every loose thing was sucked.”

— Ann Patchett

373. “Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don’t have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don’t understand, then I don’t have the time to explain it to you. If you don’t have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

375. “You can learn more, and more quickly, from other people’s missteps than from their successes. If.”

— Ann Patchett

376. “Our parents divorced when I was four. I have many memories from early childhood, and though there are plenty of scenes in which both of my parents are present, I was too young to understand that they were married. They simply existed in the same house to take care of us. The explanation of what marriage was, and that it was over, all came in a single afternoon.”

— Ann Patchett

377. “If Kumar had his way they would leave for Fiji every year just before Thanksgiving and not return until the New Year rang in and the decorations came down. They would swim with the fishes and lie on the beach eating papaya. On the years they were tired of Fiji they would go to Bali or Sydney or any sunny, sandy place whose name contained an equal number of consonants and vowels.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

379. “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

380. “If he was right and God showed His face to the living then it was the surgeons to whom we should offer our novenas. Let us pray to the ones who keep our tired hearts pumping.”

— Ann Patchett

381. “She felt a rush of that privacy that comes not from being alone but from being with the one person you are completely comfortable with.”

— Ann Patchett

382. “The idea that she would have the opportunity to get over something thrilled her. The.”

— Ann Patchett

383. “I don’t keep up the way I should. That’s the real drag about graduating. There’s never as much time to read when there’s no one there to make you do it.”

— Ann Patchett

384. “Politicians never mentioned the details of life because of course the details that appealed to one person could repel another, so what you wound up with in the end were a long string of generalities, stirring platitudes that could not buy you supper.”

— Ann Patchett

385. “It smelled like a carnival wearing new clothes.”

— Ann Patchett

386. “I’d never been in the position of getting my head around what I’d been given. I only understood what I’d lost.”

— Ann Patchett

387. “No such thing as a spoiled bunny. This is an animal who possesses a limitless capacity for affection.”

— Ann Patchett

388. “She was his wife in every way that mattered and that would save her.”

— Ann Patchett

389. “They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.”

— Ann Patchett

390. “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

391. “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

392. “I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.”

— Ann Patchett

393. “He saw Mr. Otterson as the Willy Wonka of produce.”

— Ann Patchett

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

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. “We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.”

— Ann Patchett

399. “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

400. “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