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Top Ann Patchett Quotes

Browse top 138 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Ann Patchett.

Favorite Ann Patchett Quotes

1. "Shy Carmen, always hanging back from the others, who knew she could smile? But at the sight of that smile he would have promised her anything. He was just barely awake. Or maybe he was not awake at all. Had he wanted her and not known it? Had he wanted her so much that he dreamed she was lying beside him now? The things our minds keep from us, Gen thought. The secrets we keep even from ourselves." ~ Ann Patchett
2. "I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again." ~ Ann Patchett
3. "If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day. Try it first with a bird, General Benjamin said gently to Alfredo. Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn't know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic." ~ Ann Patchett
4. "...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
5. "Must Thibault imagine the animal (who was long since dead but when and how? He couldn't remember) skinned and braised? Milou as dinner. Once something is named it can never be eaten. Once you have called it brother in your mind it should enjoy the freedoms of a brother." ~ Ann Patchett
6. "Without worry to protect me, every thought that came into my mind received real attention." ~ Ann Patchett
7. "But Dr. Rapp had no self-aggrandizing notions about his role in the tribe. He never set himself out to be the great white hero. He never took a single specimen more than what was absolutely needed. He disrupted nothing." ~ Ann Patchett
8. "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
9. "He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it." ~ Ann Patchett
10. "For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man." ~ Ann Patchett
11. "The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned." ~ Ann Patchett
12. "Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone." ~ Ann Patchett
13. "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
14. "The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months." ~ Ann Patchett
15. "The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver." ~ Ann Patchett
16. "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
17. "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
18. "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
19. "The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen." ~ Ann Patchett
20. "I will write my way into another life." ~ Ann Patchett
21. "When you think of love you think as an American. You must think like a Russian. It is a more expansive view.''Americans havea bad habbit of thinking like Americans,' Roxane said kindly." ~ Ann Patchett
22. "People souldn't be allowed to decide that they wished to remain a hostage" ~ Ann Patchett
23. "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
24. "Instead, he was astonished by what he had: the chance to sit beside this woman in the late afternoon light while she read." ~ Ann Patchett
25. "Perhaps you are right. In another setting it would be ridiculous, too grand. In another setting it would not happen because you are a famous woman and at best I would shake your famous hand for one second while you stepped into your car after a performance. But in this place I hear you sing every day. In this place I watch you eat your dinner, and what I feel in my heart is love. There is no point in not telling you that. These people who detain us so pleasantly may decide to shoot us after all. It is a possibility. And if that is the case, then why should I carry this love with me to the other world? Why not give to you what is yours?" ~ Ann Patchett
26. "If someone gave you a device with which you could see entire worlds just by holding it in front of your eyes, worlds of such beauty and complexity that they took your breath away...wouldn't you want to show this device to everyone you knew?" ~ Ann Patchett
27. "The part when they are together for a while, the two of them, before things go wrong. The way things ended always obliterated the genuine happiness that had come before and that shouldn't be the case." ~ Ann Patchett
28. "I don't have any talent for vacations." ~ Ann Patchett
29. "It was soaring, that voice, warm and complicated, utterly fearless." ~ Ann Patchett
30. "She would not attend the dinner (she did not eat before she sang) but would arrive at the end of the meal and perform six arias with her accompanist." ~ Ann Patchett
31. "Inca Cola." ~ Ann Patchett
32. "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
33. "Catholicism is an obsessive-compulsive faith." ~ Ann Patchett
34. "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
35. "... 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
36. "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
37. "...the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone..." ~ Ann Patchett
38. "Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?" ~ Ann Patchett
39. "If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins." ~ Ann Patchett
40. "It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how." ~ Ann Patchett
41. "You are always someones favorite unfolding story" ~ Ann Patchett
42. "Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice." ~ Ann Patchett
43. "In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant." ~ Ann Patchett
44. "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
45. "I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should." ~ Ann Patchett
46. "I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own." ~ Ann Patchett
47. "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
48. "I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list." ~ Ann Patchett
49. "One must not be shy where language is concerned." ~ Ann Patchett
50. "The sleep he went back to was never the one he left." ~ Ann Patchett
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Today's Quote

I played rugby most of my life and then I switched to snowboarding, which provided me a lot of inspiration."
Author: Charlie Bewley

What Did Ann Patchett Talk About?

Thin
Wit
Per
She
Here
Hen
Ear
Ten
End
Sin
Hey
Pen
King
Sing
Con
Ways
Son
Use
Lit
Writing
May
Tan
Ring
Another
Ours
While
Act
Cause
Lie
Said
Maybe
Inn
Place
Low
Woman
Era
Late
Gift
Ought
Open
Bee
Side
Story
Thou
Sleep
Hand
Seem
Air
Tend
Light

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