Ann Patchett Quotes

...was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...
Ann Patchett
Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.""They're free," Franny said. "I check them out of the library.""Well, thank God for libraries," Caroline said.
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
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
The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
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
...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
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
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
If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
Ann Patchett
If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.
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
Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
Ann Patchett
Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
Ann Patchett
We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.
Ann Patchett
She's growing up," Sister Evangeline said.And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same.
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
Isn't that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?
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
Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.
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
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
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
Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?
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
...the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone...
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
I wanted two girls," she said. "You and your sister. I wanted exactly what I had. Other people's children are too hard
Ann Patchett
One must not be shy where language is concerned.
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
The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly is always the love that is not returned.
Ann Patchett
If Kumar had his way they would leave for Fiji every year just before Thanksgiving and not return until the New Year rang in and the decorations came down. They would swim with the fishes and lie on the beach eating papaya. On the years they were tired of Fiji they would go to Bali or Sydney or any sunny, sandy place whose name contained an equal number of consonants and vowels.
Ann Patchett
He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.
Ann Patchett
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
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
There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.
Ann Patchett
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
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
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
Lelia gave a dharma talk about letting go of self-definition: I can't do this because of what happened to me in my childhood; I can't do that because I am very shy; I could never go there because I'm afraid of clowns or mushrooms or polar bears. The group gave a gentle, collective laugh of self-recognition. Teresa found the talk helpful, as she had been having an extended interior dialogue during meditation about how septuagenarians from Torrance were fundamentally unsuited for Buddhism.
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
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
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
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
Oh, my love,' she said. 'What do the only children do?''We'll never have to know.
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
Katsumi Hosokawa - (he) believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music.
Ann Patchett
... 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
Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?
Ann Patchett
Always remember, any book you haven’t read is still a new book.
Ann Patchett
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
Ann Patchett
Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. … It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.
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
It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
Ann Patchett
The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as “the stripper soundtra
Ann Patchett
Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
Ann Patchett
Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
Ann Patchett