Ann Patchett Quotes

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

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

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you'd been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you're suspended knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don't you think? 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.

I see the past as it actually was," Maeve said. She was looking at the trees. "But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.

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.

Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.

Did you ever want to be a writer?” “No,” she said, and she would have told him. “I only wanted to be a reader.

In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.

We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.

I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.

shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us

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.

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.

We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands.

There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.

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.

But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.

She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.

It’s always better to have too much to read than not enough. 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.

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.

The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.

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.

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

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.

Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.

And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.

Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?

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.

For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.

Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself.

The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.

As every reader knows, the social contract between you and a book you love is not complete until you can hand that book to someone else and say, Here, you’re going to love this.

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

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.

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.

I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn't have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn't that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write?

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself.

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.

He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.

Disappointment comes from expectation,

Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.

Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink.

Isn't that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?

Everyone knows everything eventually.

Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.

If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.

we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

There would never been an end to all the things I wished I'd asked my father. After so many years I thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I'd been not to try harder.

Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen, but it is always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent, it doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.

We were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.

If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.

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.

It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.

People want you to want what they want. If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated. If you don’t want the same things, your lack of wanting can, to certain people, come across as judgment.

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.

I will write my way into another life.

Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?

All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All

Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it.

Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.

The fact is, I love to feed other people. I love their pleasure, their comfort, their delight in being cared for. Cooking gives me the means to make other people feel better, which in a very simple equation makes me feel better. I believe that food can be a profound means of communication, allowing me to express myself in a way that seems much deeper and more sincere than words. My Gruyere cheese puffs straight from the oven say 'I'm glad you're here. Sit down, relax. I'll look after everything.' - Ann Patchett, "Dinner For One, Please, James

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.

It’s about falling so wildly in love with him—the way one will at twenty-four—that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end, nor did it occur to me to care.

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.

We had stepped into the river that takes you forward.

The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in the den to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room.

Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a visa.

Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.

I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what they wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren't other people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog.

The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.

The three stages of life: youth, middle age, and ‘You’re looking good, Mr. Keating.

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.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.

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.

Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.' 'But the other is better.' 'Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires to not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.

That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of. I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.

But it never worked that way, and the sex just made her lonelier. I understood that, as it had made me lonelier too. I could never remember being lonely, certainly not in this way, until I had seen the edge of the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad ways that person could never be there for you.

Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we has lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost has been taken from us by the person who still lived inside…

That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.

There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on...These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, "How far would you go for me?" you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, "Farther than you would ever have thought was possible.

Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.

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!

In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

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.

The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.