Ann Patchett Quotes

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

~ 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

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

~ Ann Patchett

She didn't know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.

~ Ann Patchett

...the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone...

~ 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

Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?

~ 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

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

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

~ Ann Patchett

The sleep he went back to was never the one he left.

~ Ann Patchett

Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.

~ Ann Patchett

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn't mean we aren't telling the truth; we've simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don't go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It's the story we shape and improve on, we don't change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear.

~ Ann Patchett

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

~ 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

We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.

~ Ann Patchett

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world

~ Ann Patchett

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

~ 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

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

~ Ann Patchett

If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

~ Ann Patchett

The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She was, in a sense, sitting at a craps table with her last stack of chips, trying again and again to hit it big.

~ 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

Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.

~ Ann Patchett

...as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.

~ Ann Patchett

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

~ Ann Patchett

But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.

~ Ann Patchett

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

~ 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

Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that God's own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting, warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God in heaven. It was a miracle and he wept for the gift of bearing witness.

~ Ann Patchett

...was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...

~ Ann Patchett