Ann Patchett Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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 always trust what you think, what you know... but you can always trust your nature.

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

Ann Patchett
Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

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
Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

Ann Patchett
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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