Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Duty – honor – country,’” he said in the voice of an old white man who’d been battered by war. “’Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.”

— Ann Patchett

402. “The dead we can imagine to be anything at.”

— Ann Patchett

403. “Disappointment comes from expectation, and in those days I had no expectation that Andrea would get anything less than what she wanted.”

— Ann Patchett

404. “Our cadaver was older than my father, a smaller, brown-skinned man. His mouth was open in the same horrible way, as if it were the universal last act to try and fail to gasp a final breath.”

— Ann Patchett

405. “Ready-made cigarettes lined up in their cartons were a luxury for the rich, as were acres never walked on by the people who owned them.”

— Ann Patchett

406. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

409. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

412. “The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in the den to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room.”

— Ann Patchett

413. “The general wisdom around here is if you can’t get it at Wal-Mart, you don’t need it.” Sabine looked up at the brown building, which was itself the size of another parking lot. “I’ve never actually been in one of these.” “Go on,” Kitty said. Sabine shook her head. “I’ve just never had any reason to.” Kitty stubbed out her cigarette and replaced her mitten. “Well, you are in for a treat.”

— Ann Patchett

414. “People think you have to be going someplace, when, in fact, the ride is plenty.”

— Ann Patchett

415. “Kitty stopped the cart and put in two three-packs of paper towels. “Sale.” Sabine nodded. Was $2.49 a good price? To know if paper towels were a deal this time, you’d have to remember what they cost last time. Sabine could never remember.”

— Ann Patchett

416. “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

417. “One more joy I had failed to consider: that I can talk strangers into reading books that I love.”

— Ann Patchett

418. “It is possible to love someone with all your heart and still know your union would never have survived having children together. It was one of the many things that made Karl and me such a good match: I didn’t want children and he already had them. I thought it when I caught him pouring half-and-half on the dog’s kibble. It was best this way.”

— Ann Patchett

419. “You can tell them what they should do until you don’t have any breath left, but the thing that stops them, the thing that scares them bad enough to stop, is something they have to come to by themselves.”

— Ann Patchett

420. “If you’re not going to pursue medicine professionally then I can’t see how you’re allowed to pursue it personally.”

— Ann Patchett

421. “And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.”

— Ann Patchett

422. “I don’t want to wind up some old woman who talks to her rabbit,” she said to Rabbit, who was chewing so furiously he didn’t even bother to lift his head.”

— Ann Patchett

423. “She was as silent as light on the leaves of trees.”

— Ann Patchett

424. “They watched the snow fall and fall and fall until they thought that they were the ones falling.”

— Ann Patchett

425. “I found it a comfort to be in the kitchen with her. The stove and the window and Sandy and the clock.”

— Ann Patchett

426. “I had no interest in starting over again, but there are some people whom we grant the role of oracle in our lives and when they speak – rarely, gravely – we are well-advised to listen.”

— Ann Patchett

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

430. “He liked to talk about the criminals he had put away, and how a person never knew, and how he had to protect his family, and how he wasn’t going to let the other guy make the first move, but really it was just that Bert liked guns. The.”

— Ann Patchett

431. “If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”

— Ann Patchett

432. “Only Mr. Hosokawa and the priest completely understood the importance of the music. Every note was distinct. It was the measurement of the time which had gotten away from them. It was the interpretation of their lives in the very moment they were being lived.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

434. “You don’t look like you should be with me,” he said, falling into the enchantment of the movie they made together. He.”

— Ann Patchett

435. “I always believed her, if for no other reason than I didn’t know how not to.”

— Ann Patchett

436. “The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.”

— Ann Patchett

437. “I leaned over and kissed them both on the forehead, one and then the other. It cost me nothing.”

— Ann Patchett

438. “An essential element of being a writer is learning whom to listen to and whom to ignore where your work is concerned. Every.”

— Ann Patchett

439. “But in that way life works, once I was off the hook it was easy to make the decision to go.”

— Ann Patchett

440. “The room was dark except for the light of her phone. She picked it up, even though nothing good ever came from answering the phone in the middle of the night. “Hello?” Franny said.”

— Ann Patchett

441. “Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.”

— Ann Patchett

442. “No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It.”

— Ann Patchett

443. “There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.”

— Ann Patchett

444. “She stopped there, a sudden flush of panic rising up her neck. This was a woman whose biology betrayed her at every turn. Emotions stormed across her face with a flag.”

— Ann Patchett

445. “Maybe he was just a decent man. I had started to think.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Ann Patchett