Ann Patchett Quotes & Sayings

Your mom doesn't know about the movie, does she?"
"My mom doesn't know about the book," he said, "It turns out a novel isn't the worst place to hide things. — Ann Patchett

Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not unlike seeing tigers at the zoo. — Ann Patchett

Further than five minutes ahead. But since I knew at the end of the week I couldn't go back, I called a lawyer. — Ann Patchett

It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying. — Ann Patchett

I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open. — Ann Patchett

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces. — Ann Patchett

To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall ... [p.218 ff.] — Ann Patchett

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

She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but — Ann Patchett

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

I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn't have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn't that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write? — Ann Patchett

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

I was still in high school when I decided I didn't want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my mind. — Ann Patchett

This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out. — Ann Patchett

I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing. — Ann Patchett

I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people. — Ann Patchett

Teresa kept sitting — Ann Patchett

At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was going something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all. — Ann Patchett

I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again. — Ann Patchett

Sometimes not having any idea where we're going works out better than we could possibly have imagined. — Ann Patchett

Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame — Ann Patchett

If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say. — Ann Patchett

But together they moved through the world quite easily, two small halves of courage making a brave whole. — Ann Patchett

What do the only children do? — Ann Patchett

You don't see many shy terrorists. — Ann Patchett

In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant. — Ann Patchett

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness. — Ann Patchett

I do not remember our love unfolding, that we got to know one another and in time became friends. I only remember that she came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first. — Ann Patchett

Instead of following her original plan to have an abortion, she and Fode had decided to conduct a radical social experiment they called Having the Baby, and because of the outcome of that experiment, she had dropped out of school. — Ann Patchett

He looked around the house and declared the entire situation straight-up Fitzgerald, so much so that sleeping over would have to be part of it. Astrid, — Ann Patchett

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn. — Ann Patchett

And if we fail at marriage, we are lucky we don't have to fail with the force of our whole life. I would like there to be an eighth sacrament: the sacrament of divorce. Like Communion, it is a slim white wafer on the tongue. Like confession, it is forgiveness. Forgiveness is important not so much because we've done wrong as because we feel we need to be forgiven. Family, friends, God, whoever loves us forgives us, takes us in again. They are thrilled by our life, our possibilities, our second chances. They weep with gladness that we did not have to die. ( — Ann Patchett

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver. — Ann Patchett

He doesn't know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this ... on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more. — Ann Patchett

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain. — Ann Patchett

If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day. — Ann Patchett

Time is the most extraordinary gift for friendship. You'll get to eat your meals together and study together; in some cases you'll even sleep in the same room. You'll have time to waste on each other. You'll find out every single thing you have in common and still have time to catalogue all of your differences. Don't underestimate the vital necessity of friendship in your life because it is the thing that will sustain you later, when there will be considerably less time. — Ann Patchett

Marina Singh: "You went to Radcliffe."
Annick Swenson: "I didn't love it. — Ann Patchett

I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write. — Ann Patchett

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out. — Ann Patchett

The women in the kitchen took turns making a fuss over the baby, acting like it was their job to keep her entertained until the Magi arrived. But the baby wasn't entertained. Her blue eyes were glazed over. She was staring into the middle distance, tired of everything. All this rush to make sandwiches and take in presents for a girl who was not year a year old. — Ann Patchett

Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a visa. — Ann Patchett

If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen. — Ann Patchett

No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It's simply not worth it. This is not medical school. — Ann Patchett

Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something. — Ann Patchett

It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him like music. — Ann Patchett

You don't find strangers declaring themselves to you awkward?' But then she wouldn't, would she? People must fall in love with her hourly. She must keep a staff of translators to interpret the proposals of love and marriage.
'It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying,' Roxane said. — Ann Patchett

Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone, like going to the movies by yourself in the afternoon or, back in those golden days of youth, having a cigarette in the bathtub. It is a pleasure to not have to take anyone else's tastes into account or explain why I like to drink my grapefruit juice out of the carton. Eating, after all, is a matter of taste, and taste cannot always be good taste. The very thought of maintaining high standards meal after meal is exhausting. It discounts all the peanut butter that is available in the world. — Ann Patchett

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned. — Ann Patchett

They were so taken by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their mouth, drink in. Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned. What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound? — Ann Patchett

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

You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature. — Ann Patchett

I could have had one life but insteads I had another because of this book my grandmother protected. What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later that extended to the opera, to the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that I attribute to this book. — Ann Patchett

The ability to have a friend, and to be a friend, is not unlike the ability to learn. Both are rooted in being accepting and open-minded with a talent for hard-work. If you are willing to stretch yourself, to risk yourself, if you are willing to love and honor and cherish the people who are important to you until one of you dies, then there will be great heartaches and even greater rewards. — Ann Patchett

sense trying to make him feel bad about it. She tilted back her glass and went past the gin for a second time. She — Ann Patchett

DAs were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit. The — Ann Patchett

Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement. — Ann Patchett

No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl. — Ann Patchett

Nobody is allowed to tell me where the limits of my imagination are. — Ann Patchett

She took out the bottle of Lariam and without so much as a thoughtful glance dropped it in the trash can beside her. She felt that there was something deeply flawed in her imagination that she hadn't even considered the fact that the pills could just be thrown away. — Ann Patchett

I missed my mother's father. Is that even possible? Maybe I had fallen asleep for a while. Maybe I was like her, just waking up and looking for him to be there. I wondered how it would have changed things for all of us if he had stayed home the day he was supposed to die in his car. How his decision to go out for something small, something like coffee or orange juice which everyone could have done without, had changed things for all of us. — Ann Patchett

Far outside the city the tree frogs were calling her, and the deep, rhythmic pulse of their voices set the blood flow to her heart. — Ann Patchett

Without worry to protect me, every thought that came into my mind received real attention. — Ann Patchett

There are in life a few miraculous moments when the right person is there to tell you what you need to hear and you are still open enough, impressionable enough, to take it in. — Ann Patchett

Teresa closed her eyes, waited, inhaled sonofabitch, exhaled sonofabitch. — Ann Patchett

It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
Ann Patchett — Ann Patchett

A pain exploded up high in her chest and spit her out of this terrible world. — Ann Patchett

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how. — Ann Patchett

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

Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.'
'But the other is better.'
'Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them. — Ann Patchett

They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them. — Ann Patchett

I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what they wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren't other people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog. — Ann Patchett

It's not more complicated than that," she said. "That's all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?" Look — Ann Patchett

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

She has a point," Cousins said. He never would have stood back here making sandwiches, though he felt he could use a sandwich, that he wanted one, and so he poured himself another drink. — Ann Patchett

They said no, she can't make it. They said everything's closed. And I said you don't know Ann. And then he drifted off to sleep. Explain doubt to me, because at that moment I ceased to understand it. In return I will tell you everything I know about love. — Ann Patchett

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

The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as "the stripper soundtrack":
Boom chicka-boom, boom-boom chicka-boom.
When their mother stopped walking the soundtrack stopped. If she took a single step it was accompanied by Albie saying only "boom" in a voice that was weirdly sexual for a six-year-old. — Ann Patchett

You are always someones favorite unfolding story — Ann Patchett

Isn't that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered? — Ann Patchett

Oh, my love,' she said. 'What do the only children do?'

'We'll never have to know. — Ann Patchett

I received a gift
it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my 25 years of live. Does your husband make you a better person? — Ann Patchett

For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man. — Ann Patchett

Shy Carmen, always hanging back from the others, who knew she could smile? But at the sight of that smile he would have promised her anything. He was just barely awake. Or maybe he was not awake at all. Had he wanted her and not known it? Had he wanted her so much that he dreamed she was lying beside him now? The things our minds keep from us, Gen thought. The secrets we keep even from ourselves. — Ann Patchett

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads. — Ann Patchett

The impressions we pick up as children, when our minds are still open to influence and as soft as damp sponges, are likely to stay with us the longest. — Ann Patchett

His own children were not members of the Clemson incoming freshman class, but two of his nieces and a nephew were. On the news, he outlined his problems with the summer-reading committee's selection. The book talks in graphic terms about pornography, about fetish, about masturbation, about multiple sex partners . . . The book contains a very extensive list of over-the-top sexual and antireligious references. The explicit message that this sends to students is that they are encouraged to find themselves sexually. — Ann Patchett

I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should. — Ann Patchett

He realized then what he had known from the first minute he saw her, from when she leaned out the kitchen door and called for her husband. This was the start of his life. — Ann Patchett

As if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice. — Ann Patchett

had I listened to no one, or only to the people who liked me, the workshop would have been a waste of time. — Ann Patchett

I have always believed that the desire for revenge is one of life's great motivators, and my success would be my revenge — Ann Patchett

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

That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch. — Ann Patchett

Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone. — Ann Patchett

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens. — Ann Patchett

Forgiveness was at the heart of everything. Because I could not ask, I could not be forgiven. — Ann Patchett

He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together. — Ann Patchett

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. — Ann Patchett

I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible. — Ann Patchett