Patchett Ann Quotes & Sayings

You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no. — Ann Patchett

When did the mammals get confusing? Who can't look at a baby and a puppy and see the differences? You can't leave babies at home alone with a chew toy when you go to the movies. Babies will not shimmy under the covers to sleep on your feet when you're cold. Babies, for all their many unarguable charms, will not run with you in the park, or wait by the door for your return, and, as far as I can tell, they know absolutely nothing of unconditional love. — Ann Patchett

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

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

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

Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith. — 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

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 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

Maybe he was concerned, or bored, or inappropriately friendly, or midwestern friendly. — Ann Patchett

For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly , and from sources you never imagined to be probable. — 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

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

She's a nice girl, Tennessee said as a way of saying goodbye to them, as a way of saying thank you and I'm sorry, as a way of saying, I wish I had never let you go and I wish we had never met. — 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

Had I known anything about the elegance of quitting at the right time, I would have made so many people, starting with myself and Dennis, so much happier. — 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

Like her mother and all her mother's people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry night. Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth. — Ann Patchett

He'd told her she wouldn't have to do anything but lie on the big down sofa in the front room and read all day, or she could ride her bike to the beach and read. — Ann Patchett

She told the woman to go to one of the online agent sites that list agents who are looking for new clients, and then follow their submission guidelines to the letter. If they ask for a twenty-page writing sample, do not send in twenty-two pages. — Ann Patchett

All I had ever wanted was a dog who would sleep in my lap while I read and lick my neck and bring me the ball to throw eighty-seven times in a row. I thought a dog would be the key to perfect happiness. And I was right. We are perfectly happy. ( — Ann Patchett

There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss. — 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

Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself. — Ann Patchett

And there it went, the burden of her lifetime, taken. — Ann Patchett

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

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
— Ann Patchett

Stories are based in conflict, and when the conflict is resolved the story ends. That's because for the most part happiness is amorphous, wordless, and largely uninteresting. — Ann Patchett

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

A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. — Ann Patchett

People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappoint them, or if they do, the owners manage to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me. — Ann Patchett

to never have to look at someone who was remembering when you have made such a concerted effort to forget. — Ann Patchett

Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job. — Ann Patchett

The quality of a life is defined not by its length, but by its depth, its actions and achievements. It is defined by our ability to love. — Ann Patchett

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

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

Everyone knows everything eventually. — Ann Patchett

Writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way. — Ann Patchett

My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That's why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction. — Ann Patchett

What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it's the closest thing to being God you're ever going to get. All the decisions are yours. You decide when the sun comes up. You decide who gets to fall in love and who gets hit by a car. You have to make all the trees and all the leaves and then sew the leaves onto the trees. You make the entire world. — Ann Patchett

GAWKING IS A LOOK stronger than a stare. The gawk was full of brazen curiosity, pity, and fear, every unattractive human emotion rolled into one unflattering facial expression. — Ann Patchett

I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it. — 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

Art is not sin. It's not always good. But it is not a sin. — 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

She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room. — Ann Patchett

With Tennessee there to visit, Regina Cleri had been bearable to him, and without her he felt like what he was: a useless old man who had been shelved away to die. — 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

I will write my way into another life. — Ann Patchett

Just do me a favor first - go find the baby. Find out who has her. If I go out there now everybody's going to want to start talking and it'll be midnight before I find her. Take a quick walk around, would you do that? Make sure some drunk didn't leave her in a chair." "How will I know it's your baby?" Cousins asked. Now that he thought about it, he hadn't seen a baby at the party, and surely with all these Micks there were bound to be plenty of them. "She's the new one," Fix said, his voice gone suddenly sharp, like Cousins was an idiot, like this was the reason some guys had to be lawyers rather than cops. "She's the one in the fancy dress. It's her party. — Ann Patchett

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

Kentucky, a state whose capital I did not know. I had never wondered about Kentucky, never imagined it as a girl the way I had New York or Houston or Paris. No one I knew had ever been to Kentucky, or was planning on going, and so I thought it would be the last place anyone would look for me. "Tell — Ann Patchett

I slept like his sister would have, without trouble or dreams. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn to write by writing — 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

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

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

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

It's like a big circle. I've gone on a get-a-man crusade, but so far it's been a disaster and I'm feeling as bad about myself as I ever have. I know I'm a great person and all that, a good friend, but I feel like real bottom of the barrel girlfriend material. — Ann Patchett

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

If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick. — Ann Patchett

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

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

I had to wait until the thought of not telling you was worse than the thought of telling you. Does — Ann Patchett

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

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

I understood how we long to believe in goodness, especially in the person we promised to love and honor. It isn't just about them, it is how we want to see ourselves. It says that we are good people, patient and kind. — Ann Patchett

Being a childless woman of childbearing age, I am a walking target for people's concerned analysis. No one looks at a single man with a Labrador retriever and says, "Will you look at the way he throws the tennis ball to that dog? Now there's a guy who wants to have a son." A dog, after all, is man's best friend, a comrade, a pal. But give a dog to a woman and people will say she is sublimating. If she says that she, in fact, doesn't want children, they will nod understandingly and say, "You just wait." For the record, I do not speak to my dog in baby talk, nor when calling her do I say, "Come to Mama. — Ann Patchett

The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you're lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you're alive. — Ann Patchett

No, you don't look at the cigarette, you look at me. When you light a cigarette you have to look the person in the eyes. — Ann Patchett

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

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

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

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

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