Top 500 Ann Patchett Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— Ann Patchett

402. “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

403. “I don’t think I ever took the train to Philadelphia without thinking of chemistry, and how Morey Able told me that without a solid grasp of chapter 1, chapter 2 would be impossible. Maeve had done that work when our mother came back, gone all the way to the beginning until she was certain she understood what had happened.”

— Ann Patchett

404. “It is possible to love someone with all your heart and still know your union would never have survived having children together.”

— Ann Patchett

405. “She was not one to set her teeth so far into something that she couldn’t let go when presented with the truth.”

— Ann Patchett

406. “Celeste was plenty happy in those days, though in retrospect she was the ultimate victim of bad timing, thinking that because she was good in chemistry she should marry a doctor instead of becoming a doctor herself. Had she come along a few years later she might have missed that trap altogether.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

408. “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

409. “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

410. “I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her.”

— Ann Patchett

411. “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

412. “French wine was the cornerstone of French diplomacy. They handed it out like peppermints.”

— Ann Patchett

413. “Girls and their dates still got dressed to go to the Apollo for amateur night but by 1968 pretty much every representation of hope in the country had been put up against a wall and shot.”

— Ann Patchett

414. “How was I supposed to get through Easter without her?”

— Ann Patchett

415. “Those were lean years for emotional charity...”

— Ann Patchett

416. “Once you decide that strangers are more than just dangerous accidents waiting to happen, you will find yourself able to listen. How much sadness could be averted by taking the time to notice all the people we have come to ignore? Would we in fact be safer and not more at risk if we asked someone to voice his feelings rather than wait until he looked for other means of making himself heard?”

— Ann Patchett

417. “After her death, at the age of thirty-nine, I wrote a book about us. I wrote it as a way to memorialize her and mourn her, and as a way of keeping her own important memoir, Autobiography of a Face, alive, even as I had not been able to keep her alive. This was a story of a Herculean effort to endure hardship, and to be a friend. Even when the details of our lives became sordid, it was not the stuff of sewers.”

— Ann Patchett

418. “The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side.”

— Ann Patchett

419. “He couldn’t help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. “Is.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

421. “Maybe once he wished I was his daughter, because it was plain that my news was hard for him to hear.”

— Ann Patchett

422. “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

423. “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

424. “Though I had been a doctor for only a short time, I knew the havoc the well could unleash upon the sick.”

— Ann Patchett

425. “Everybody likes Anders. But if Vogel.”

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

427. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

430. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— 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. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

439. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Ann Patchett

449. “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

450. “Because I was fifteen and generally an idiot, I thought that the feeling of home I was experiencing had to do with the car and where it was parked, instead of attributing it wholly and gratefully to my sister.”

— Ann Patchett