Ann Patchett Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.

Ann Patchett
I believe that, more than anything else, 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
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
You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.

Ann Patchett
Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

Ann Patchett
Starting a novel isn't so different from starting a marriage. The dreams you pin on these people are enormous. You are diving into the lives of your characters, knowing that you will fall in love with all of them, knowing... that in the end the love will finish and turn you out on the street alone.

Ann Patchett
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
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
But we cannot unbraid the story of another person's life and take out all the parts that don't suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.

Ann Patchett
If we fail at marriage, we are lucky we don't have to fail with the force of our whole life. I would like there to be an eighth sacrament: the sacrament of divorce.

Ann Patchett
Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.

Ann Patchett
The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.

Ann Patchett
My divorce began less than a week before we were married.

Ann Patchett
The novel in my imagination travels with me like a small lavender moth making loopy circles around my head. It is a truly gorgeous thing, its unpredictable flight patterns, the amethyst light on its wings.

Ann Patchett
Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

Ann Patchett
It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular 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
That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.

Ann Patchett
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
You can't always trust what you think, what you know... but you can always trust your nature.

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
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
You can't pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.

Ann Patchett
Nothing comforted Sabine like long division.... 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
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.

Ann Patchett
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