Top 207 Quotes & Sayings by Ann Patchett - Page 3

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.

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

I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.

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.

Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.

It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.

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.

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.

Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.

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.

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.

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!

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.

Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.

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

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

To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]

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.

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

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.

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

From my table inside I watch the glamorous women outside who are lunching on Spa Cobb salads without blue cheese or dressing. The man with the bread basket wanders from table to table, lonesome as a cloud. When he comes to me his basket is full and perfectly arranged. He gives me a smile of sincere pleasure when I tell him I will take both the sourdough roll and the cheese stick.

I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.

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

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

I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.

I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.

I don't want to stand with somebody's praise. Whereas now when people come up to me, they say, "I love the bookstore" and "Kids! Come here, come here! This is the woman who owns the bookstore." That's incredible. I can say to that, "Thank you for shopping local. Thank you for coming in. What are you reading? Let's talk about books." It's about something I'm doing as opposed to somehow something I am. I feel comfortable and positive in that role. Because it's about reading. It's about books. It's about learning. It's about business and tax base.

I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.

That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down.

I'm very comfortable writing.

I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.

I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels more noble.

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom.

[I remember going] to a hotel gym at six o'clock in the morning, and the television was on, and it's some drama in which two men have clearly kidnapped a woman. They're interrogating her, and they put a plastic bag over her head. They're suffocating her, and I'm thinking, It's six o'clock in the morning! Why does anybody need to see this? How can I find the off switch?

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.

I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.

We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.

Everybody believes in chance.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

I don't really do anything with the Internet except check my email. I have a much higher opinion of humanity because of that.

I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.

I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.

Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.

I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.