Ann Patchett What Now Quotes & Sayings

If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. — Ann Patchett

The terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone ... — Ann Patchett

It was my own special brand of insanity that made me think the trials of Lucy's life could somehow be eased by the order of Tupperware. — Ann Patchett

Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It's not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from. — Ann Patchett

One must not be shy where language is concerned. — Ann Patchett

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward. — Ann Patchett

They had wanted to go to the barn and brush the horses. If they brushed the horses and mucked out a few of the stalls then usually Ned would let them take turns riding the mare for the afternoon. But Albie was driving them crazy. What was he doing that was so intolerable? Standing here in front of him now, Franny couldn't remember. Or maybe he wasn't doing anything wrong. Maybe it was just that someone had to watch him around the horses and none of them wanted to do it. He wasn't the monster they told him he was, in fact there wasn't anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid. — Ann Patchett

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

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 wrote the last sentence of The Patron Saint of Liars in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in my life as a writer to match that moment, the blue of the sky and the breeze drifting in from the bay. I had done the thing I had always wanted to do: I had written a book, all the way to the end. Even if it proved to be terrible, it was mine. — Ann Patchett

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

It was already in place, without him seeing any of it, the web was spun and snug around the house, and while his first impulse, the natural impulse, was to press ahead anyway and see if he might beat out the odds, clear logic held him. — Ann Patchett

Writing stories was always a bit like falling in love with a stranger and running off to Marrakech for a long weekend. It didn't have to be successful to be thrilling. — Ann Patchett

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

Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves. — 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

Someday we'll look back on all of this and we won't even believe we were here," she whispered. "We'll say, 'Do you remember when we used to live in Iowa?'" I smiled, warm, already falling back to sleep. I told her, "We'll say, 'That happened during the Iowa years. — Ann Patchett

We are, on this earth, so incredibly small, in the history of time, in the crowd of the world, we are practically invisible, not even a dot, and yet we have each other to hold on to. 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

As if music were a separate thing you could drive yourself into, make love to, fuck. — Ann Patchett

What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow. — 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

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

Bert . . . had grown up with frozen concentrate mixed into pitchers of water which, although he hadn't known it at the time, had nothing to do with orange juice. Now his children drank fresh-squeezed juice as thoughtlessly as he had drunk milk as a boy. They squeezed it from the fruit they had picked off the trees in their own backyard. He could see a new set of muscles in the right forearm of his wife, Teresa, from the constant twisting of oranges on the juicer while their children held up their cups and waited for more. Orange juice was all they wanted, Bert told him. They had it every morning with their cereal, and Teresa froze it into popsicles to the children for their afternoon snacks, and in the evening he and Teresa drank it over ice with vodka or bourbon or gin. This was what no one seemed to understand - it didn't matter what you put into it, what mattered was the juice itself. "People from California forget that, because they've been spoiled," Bert said. — 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

He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained! — Ann Patchett

Received a gift - it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. "Does your husband make you a better person?" Edra asked. There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about. "Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?" she said, running down her list. "Does he make you better?" "That's not the question," I said. "It's so much more complicated than that." "It's not more complicated than that, — 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

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

Question Eight: Self-righteousness is an insidious spiritual disease which is a betrayer of the gospel of grace and a great hindrance to evangelism. What is self-righteousness? Why is it such a hindrance to evangelism? How does the gospel of grace enable us to repent of our self-righteousness and free us to share the gospel with compassion? Maybe I was all right with it for a while. I read their answers, too, and in those answers Lucy and Jesus walked together as friends. The self-righteous exuded a condescending air of moral superiority that non-Christians are rightly repulsed by. I appreciated that. — Ann Patchett

Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on. — 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 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

Learn to write by writing — 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

That's why you can eat cheesecake,' she said, and sighed. 'Because you don't. That's the way it works. — Ann Patchett

You can't control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative. — Ann Patchett

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

Time could barely pull the second hand forward on the clock ... — Ann Patchett

Does this raise or lower, then, the everyday importance of art? Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape? (excerpted letter from Lucy Grealy) — Ann Patchett

whenever possible, you need to go to the primary source to make your decisions. Regardless of whether or not you're a student, it is never enough to rely on other people's ideas. You have to look at the thing itself and make up your own mind. That's what it means to study and to learn. Some secondary sources proclaim their points of view so loudly and with such passion you might be tempted just to take their word for it. You might be tempted not to do the work of checking to see for yourself. But there can be a fine line between obedience and laziness, and if you go through life dutifully taking other people's word about what's right, you are putting yourself in the position to be led down some very dark roads. After — 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

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

As long as it's a regular day, not too rough to begin with, the ocean is pretty smooth once you make it out past the first set of waves. That's why people are afriad to swim in the ocean. They try to jump over those waves and get slammed down to the bottom and pulled across the sand like a piece of shell. You've got to go throught them, dive under just when they're rising up for you, set your direction, close your eyes, and just swim like hell. Once you get throught that, you'll find there isn't a better place for swimming because it's the ocean and it goes on forever. You don't have to see anyone if you don't want to. If you look out, away from the beach, it's easy to imagine that there's no one else but you in the whole world, you and maybe a couple of sea gulls. — Ann Patchett

The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living. — Ann Patchett