Ann Patchett Quotes

Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.

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.

Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.

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.

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

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.

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

Learn to write by writing

You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen.

No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do

We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.

Everybody believes in chance.

Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.

I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.

Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?

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

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend. You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer. You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person. You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.

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.

Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame

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

People gave me such a bad time about wanting a baby. I didn't want a baby, and I still don't. I wanted a dog.

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.

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

If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.

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

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

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

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

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.

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.

I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.

Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.

I know that there are people out there who believe we should get rid of all guns.

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.

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.

Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

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