Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

405. “It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain.”

— Ann Patchett

406. “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

407. “The madder Maeve got, the more thoughtful she became. In this way she reminded me of our father – every word she spoke came individually wrapped.”

— Ann Patchett

408. “But part of what I love about both novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive.”

— Ann Patchett

409. “In my books, I make up the experiences and the characters, but the emotional life is real. It is my own.”

— Ann Patchett

410. “Hard work is first and foremost hard, and whether or not it’s ultimately rewarding is very rarely the thing you’re thinking of at the moment.”

— Ann Patchett

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “It was years later that Joe told me how he’d thought his heart would stop when he saw Duke there in the middle of the road, holding Emily.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

416. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

419. “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

420. “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

421. “Because this is the thing about youth, you change your mind.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

423. “The President’s unwavering devotion to his television set was so potentially embarrassing his cabinet would gladly have traded it in for an indiscreet mistress.”

— Ann Patchett

424. “I felt a quick gust of annoyance and I let it turn to anger, anger being infinitely preferable to guilt.”

— Ann Patchett

425. “You have to remember that they could go at any time, and if a man’s smart he never forgets that.”

— Ann Patchett

426. “Maybe it was possible, we thought, to rise above the pathetic holidays of our youth.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

428. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

431. “It’s as if someone bought all the diamonds at Tiffany’s, and crushed them into dust, then spread that dust across the water so that it sifts down evenly, filtering through the shards of light that cut into the depth. We are swimming through eternity, my daughters’ bright mermaid legs, kicking out, towards deeper water. I stay beneath the surface and marvel for as long as lungs can hold. “Swimming is the reset button,” Pallas used to say, “swimming starts the day again.”

— Ann Patchett

432. “It was the thing that Sabine believed in, more than passion, more than tradition. Find a man you love who is good to you.”

— Ann Patchett

433. “He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.”

— Ann Patchett

434. “People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go. But at seventeen, I didn’t understand, and so I left.”

— Ann Patchett

435. “So was the movie excruciating to watch because nothing was right, or was it excruciating to watch because, impossibly, some things were? Every.”

— Ann Patchett

436. “She could read the patterns, knew at a glance a Melas from a Konya, a Ladik from a Sivas. She loved the Ladik.”

— Ann Patchett

437. “The children had been happy to see me when I first came through the door the day before but since had discovered that I was the same person they’d always known.”

— Ann Patchett

438. “Teresa had once thought her husband to be the handsomest man in the world, when in fact he looked like one of those gargoyles perched on a high corner of Notre Dame that’s meant to scare the devil away.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

443. “For so many years I have kissed him. For so many years I have not kissed another soul, and there is a deep and abiding comfort in this.”

— Ann Patchett

444. “You can’t pretend this isn’t happening,” Maisie said. I couldn’t, and I don’t. Nor do I pretend that all of us being together doesn’t fill me with joy. I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.”

— Ann Patchett

445. “It’s like this enormous tree had just crashed through the house and I was picking up the leaves so no one would notice what had happened.”

— Ann Patchett

446. “At home, the puppy Rose played with balls, struggled with the stairs, and slept behind my knees while we watched in adoration. It’s not that I was unhappy in what I now think of as “the dogless years,” but I suspected things could be better. What I never could have imagined was how much better they would be. Whatever holes I had in my life, in my character, were suddenly filled. I had entered into my first adult relationship of mutual, unconditional love.”

— Ann Patchett

447. “People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did.”

— Ann Patchett

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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