Ann Patchett Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

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

Ann Patchett
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.

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

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
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 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
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
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
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
Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

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

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
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
You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.

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
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
People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappointment them, or, if they do, the owners manages 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
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
If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.

Ann Patchett
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
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
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
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
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
The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.

Ann Patchett
There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

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

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 can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

Ann Patchett