Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

405. “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

406. “He wondered sometimes if it was love or just a lack of rest that had twisted such a longing in his heart.”

— Ann Patchett

407. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

417. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

424. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “The worst part is understanding you’re going to die.′ She looked at me, her black eyebrows raised. ‘You didn’t understand that?’ I shook my head. ‘You think you understand it. You think that when you’re ninety-six you’ll lie down on the couch after a big Thanksgiving dinner and not wake up, but even then you’re not really sure. Maybe there’ll be some special dispensation for you. Everybody thinks that.”

— Ann Patchett

432. “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

433. “But in her day, Emily had been a beast, a teenage girl so riven with hormones and rage that her two younger sisters decided it would be easier to just be good. Emily had raised sufficient hell for all of them put together.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

435. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

440. “She isn’t my mother.” He meant, of course, by simple mathematical extension, that his mother wasn’t Teddy’s mother either. Which meant that Bernadette, for whom he had lit a thousand candles, was the mother to whom his enormous love and devotion had no claim.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

442. “One day was just the same as the next and so he reasoned there would never be exactly a right time or a wrong time.”

— Ann Patchett

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

446. “If you grow corn or trade in pigs or write poetry then you go to Iowa City.” “That’s why I haven’t been.”

— Ann Patchett

447. “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

448. “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 a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers.”

— Ann Patchett

449. “Where will they build the new Health Sciences building?” He waved his hand as if to indicate up there, north. “I have no idea. You’d think that would be the first order of business, but until they get that major gift they don’t make any commitments. I imagine it has to be somewhere near the Armory. Do you know about the Armory? What a disaster that’s going to be.”

— Ann Patchett

450. “His understanding that he would eventually lose every sweetness that had come to him only made him hold those very things closer to his chest.”

— Ann Patchett