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Ann Patchett Quotes | Quotes said by Ann Patchett

  • Ann Patchett Quote #1

    ... the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.


  • Ann Patchett Quote #2

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

  • Ann Patchett Quote #3

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

  • Ann Patchett Quote #4

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

  • Ann Patchett Quote #5

    Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #8

    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. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. 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 Quote #9

    Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. 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. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #10

    Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

    He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #15

    Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It's a plague. It's like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it.
    STATE OF WONDER

  • Ann Patchett Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

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

  • Ann Patchett Quote #21

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

  • Ann Patchett Quote #22

    It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

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

  • Ann Patchett Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #27

    Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen, but it is always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent, it doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #28

    Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

  • Ann Patchett Quote #29

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

  • Ann Patchett Quote #30

    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.

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