Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Tell me you’re going to be a shrink. It would be so beneficial.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

403. “A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost.”

— Ann Patchett

404. “Novel writing, I soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea. If I thought too much about how far I’d come or the distance I still had to cover, I’d sink.”

— Ann Patchett

405. “For as many times as the horrible thing happens, a thousand times in every day the horrible thing passes us by.”

— Ann Patchett

406. “If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need.”

— Ann Patchett

407. “Lucy was invisible, exuberant, and utterly birdlike in her wild, darting freedom.”

— Ann Patchett

408. “All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear.”

— Ann Patchett

409. “I went to college so I wouldn’t have to pick cherries,” Nell said. “College is closed,” Joe said. “College can’t protect you now.”

— Ann Patchett

410. “What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.”

— Ann Patchett

411. “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

412. “In 1954, money was precious; train tickets and operas were unimaginable things. In a different time, such a production would have seemed too complicated for a child, but this was only a handful of years after the war and children then were much more likely to understand a whole host of things that might seem impossible for children now. They.”

— Ann Patchett

413. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

415. “You don’t have to like your work to be good at it.”

— Ann Patchett

416. “Marion and I keep no secret store of love for each other, I will promise you that. Everything that was kind between us we killed with years of dedication and hard work. When I hang up the phone with her now it’s hard to imagine that one tender word has ever passed between us.”

— Ann Patchett

417. “There’s no protecting anyone,” Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. “Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.”

— Ann Patchett

418. “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

419. “Zen- Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thu but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers.”

— Ann Patchett

420. “Had they thought for a minute that things might turn out the way they did they never would have had the courage to begin.”

— Ann Patchett

421. “When we do things differently, and very often we do, I remind myself that it is rarely a matter of right and wrong. We are simply two adults who grew up in different houses far away from one another.”

— Ann Patchett

422. “Everything looks so logical going backwards – Yes, of course, that’s what we did – but going forward it’s something else entirely. Going forward, the lights may as well be off.”

— Ann Patchett

423. “The world is full of things we’re better off not knowing.”

— Ann Patchett

424. “In my family, there were happy Thanksgivings and tolerable Easters, but Christmas was a holiday we failed at with real vigor.”

— Ann Patchett

425. “Cal!′ Beverly called out over the crowd... But Cal looked back at her as if it were some weird coincidence that his name was Cal and this complete stranger had said something to someone who was also named Cal. He turned away. Jeanette stood just beside her, looking at the strap of her little shoulder bad, staring at it. Had anyone had this child tested?”

— Ann Patchett

426. “Transcendentalist movement?”

— Ann Patchett

427. “It sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.”

— Ann Patchett

428. “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

429. “They were her kidnappers, sailing her across the lawn and into the backseat of the car, lifting up her feet while pivoting her around in a way that was disturbingly professional, as if stealing old people was what they did.”

— Ann Patchett

430. “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

431. “I decided I was going to make up a novel, and that the novel was going to get me out of the restaurant. The novel was going to be my getaway car.”

— Ann Patchett

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

437. “I will write a check, because even while it isn’t much, it’s something, which has got to be better than doing nothing at all. I tell them not to let greatness be the enemy of goodness.”

— Ann Patchett

438. “The past, were I to type it up, would look like a disaster, but regardless of how it ended we all had many good days. In that sense the past is much like the present because the present – this unparalleled disaster – is the happiest time of my life:.”

— Ann Patchett

439. “I had never loved anyone more than I loved Joe Nelson at that moment.”

— Ann Patchett

440. “Franny brushed the snow off her shoulders and made her way to the rented SUV. She had never told that story to Leo. She had meant to but then for some reason she decided to hold it back. Now she understood that at some point far out in the future there would be a night just like tonight, and she would remember this story and know that no one else in the world knew it had happened except Albie. She had needed to keep something for herself.”

— Ann Patchett

441. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

443. “The girls believed we were so old then, their father and I, that they took into account we might not remember our own lives.”

— Ann Patchett

444. “It is as if every action in my life has been planned for the pleasures of this very afternoon.”

— Ann Patchett

445. “But Dr. Rapp had no self-aggrandizing notions about his role in the tribe. He never set himself out to be the great white hero. He never took a single specimen more than what was absolutely needed. He disrupted nothing.”

— Ann Patchett

446. “I can’t imagine what kind of work it would take to actually put the past in order.”

— Ann Patchett

447. “She was shocked by how bad he looked. Cancer really was the devil’s handshake.”

— Ann Patchett

448. “The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.”

— Ann Patchett

449. “If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, “I’ll be playing in Carnegie Hall next month!” you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to The New Yorker.”

— Ann Patchett

450. “It must be a comfort, having them with you,” Andrea said to him, not of his children but of his paintings.”

— Ann Patchett