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

352. “You keep someone always for what he or she is worth to you, for what you can trade her for, money or freedom or somebody else you want more. Any person can be a kind of trading chip when you find a way to hold her.”

— Ann Patchett

353. “The conversations I had had so often with magazine editors were now internalized. I could read both parts of the script. Did I think that was a beautiful scene I had written? Yes, I did. Did it further the cause of the novel? No, not really. Could I then delete it? It was already gone.”

— Ann Patchett

354. “Children have a real failure of imagination when it comes to thinking of the adults in their lives as having done anything of interest, anything at all, in the time known as before.”

— Ann Patchett

355. “Oh, would that we had always lived in a world in which every man, woman and child came equipped with a device for audio recording, still photography, and short films.”

— Ann Patchett

356. “You’re not a mushroom who popped up after a rain. You have parents.”

— Ann Patchett

357. “I was a writer and nothing else, and to miss seeing me as such was to miss me altogether.”

— Ann Patchett

358. “Celeste blamed Maeve for everything she was afraid to blame me for.”

— Ann Patchett

359. “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

360. “MOST OF THE writers and artists I know were made for sheltering in place. The world asks us to engage, and for the most part we can, but given the choice, we’d rather stay home.”

— Ann Patchett

361. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

371. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

377. “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

378. “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

379. “Nell is a girl without secrets. Watching her face is like going to a movie.”

— Ann Patchett

380. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

383. “Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.”

— Ann Patchett

384. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

390. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

392. “Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

394. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett