Ann Patchett Quotes

Nebraska was white, a page as still as fallen snow. It was not crosshatched with roads, overrun with the hard lines of interstate systems. It was a state on which you could make lists, jot down phone numbers, draw pictures.

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

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.

Isn't often the past picks up the phone and calls, affording the opportunity to reconsider personal history in a way that could have saved countless thousands of dollars in therapy had I been inclined to go. I

Maybe it's working because I'm an author, and maybe it's working because Karen works like life depends on this bookstore, or because we have a particularly brilliant staff, or because Nashville is a city that is particularly sympathetic to all things independent. Maybe we just got lucky. But my luck has made me believe that changing the course of the corporate world is possible. Amazon doesn't get to make all the decisions; the people can make them by how and where they spend their money. If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore. If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read the book. This is how we change the world: we grab hold of it. We change ourselves.

They were lined with the pelts of cast-off teddy bears. There was no vanity in winter.

Forgiveness was at the heart of everything. Because I could not ask, I could not be forgiven.

Teresa kept sitting

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.

Gen stopped and talked to Simon Thaibault, who was reading One Hundred Years Of Solutide in Spanish.
'This will take me forever,' Thaibault said to Gen in French, 'Maybe a hundred years. At least I know I have the time.'
'Who knew that being kidnapped was so much like attending university?' Gen said.

Had I known anything about the elegance of quitting at the right time, I would have made so many people, starting with myself and Dennis, so much happier.

It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him like music.

Based on my own experience, I believe the brain is as soft and malleable as bread dough when we're young. I am grateful for every class trip to the symphony I went on and curse any night I was allowed to watch The Brady Bunch, because all of it stuck. Conversely, I am now capable of forgetting entire novels that I've read, and I've been influenced not at all by books I passionately love and would kill to be influenced by. Think about this before you let your child have an iPad.

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,

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.

He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.

The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money, remember that. You gotta be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what's going on around you. None of that costs a dime.

The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.

She told the woman to go to one of the online agent sites that list agents who are looking for new clients, and then follow their submission guidelines to the letter. If they ask for a twenty-page writing sample, do not send in twenty-two pages.

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.

What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.

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.

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.

One boy took a peppermint from a woman's satin evening clutch but first held it up discreetly for consent. She moved her head down and back, just a quarter of an inch, and he smiled and slipped off the cellophane.

Learn to write by writing

My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That's why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.

Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It's not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.

Art is not sin. It's not always good. But it is not a sin.

But over time people break apart, no matter how enormous the love they feel for one another is, and it is through the breaking and the reconciliation, the love and the doubting of love, the judgment and then the coming together again, that we find our own identity and define our relationships.

I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open.

The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She was, in a sense, sitting at a craps table with her last stack of chips, trying again and again to hit it big.

Until then I'll keep writing things down, both the things I make up and the things that have happened. It is the way I've learned to see my life.

Those were lean years for emotional charity...

She has a point," Cousins said. He never would have stood back here making sandwiches, though he felt he could use a sandwich, that he wanted one, and so he poured himself another drink.

Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame

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.

I wrote the last sentence of The Patron Saint of Liars in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in my life as a writer to match that moment, the blue of the sky and the breeze drifting in from the bay. I had done the thing I had always wanted to do: I had written a book, all the way to the end. Even if it proved to be terrible, it was mine.

Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.

I was young and filled with a degree of self-interest that could rightly be called selfishness. Nothing was more important than the stories we wrote,

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

Eating as a simple means of ending hunger is one of the great liberties of being alone, like going to the movies by yourself in the afternoon or, back in those golden days of youth, having a cigarette in the bathtub. It is a pleasure to not have to take anyone else's tastes into account or explain why I like to drink my grapefruit juice out of the carton. Eating, after all, is a matter of taste, and taste cannot always be good taste. The very thought of maintaining high standards meal after meal is exhausting. It discounts all the peanut butter that is available in the world.

At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was going something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all.

Far outside the city the tree frogs were calling her, and the deep, rhythmic pulse of their voices set the blood flow to her heart.

She was his wife in every way that mattered and that would save her.

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.

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

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.

Maybe once he wished I was his daughter, because it was plain that my news was hard for him to hear.

When I hear Roxane sing I am still able to think well of the world," Gen said. "This is a world in which she can still sing that music with so much compassion. That's proof of something, isn't it?

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.

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.

The madder Maeve got, the more thoughtful she became. In this way she reminded me of our father -- every word she spoke came individually wrapped.

But together they moved through the world quite easily, two small halves of courage making a brave whole.

She would not attend the dinner (she did not eat before she sang) but would arrive at the end of the meal and perform six arias with her accompanist.

They had wanted to go to the barn and brush the horses. If they brushed the horses and mucked out a few of the stalls then usually Ned would let them take turns riding the mare for the afternoon. But Albie was driving them crazy. What was he doing that was so intolerable? Standing here in front of him now, Franny couldn't remember. Or maybe he wasn't doing anything wrong. Maybe it was just that someone had to watch him around the horses and none of them wanted to do it. He wasn't the monster they told him he was, in fact there wasn't anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.

Shy Carmen, always hanging back from the others, who knew she could smile? But at the sight of that smile he would have promised her anything. He was just barely awake. Or maybe he was not awake at all. Had he wanted her and not known it? Had he wanted her so much that he dreamed she was lying beside him now? The things our minds keep from us, Gen thought. The secrets we keep even from ourselves.

Further than five minutes ahead. But since I knew at the end of the week I couldn't go back, I called a lawyer.

I do not remember our love unfolding, that we got to know one another and in time became friends. I only remember that she came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first.

It was my own special brand of insanity that made me think the trials of Lucy's life could somehow be eased by the order of Tupperware.

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.

All four of the boys were frozen, mesmerized, the weirdest chill washing over their skin while they watched this miraculous growing animal devouring the earth in every direction, every direction where there was grass and not bothering them at all on the pavement. The fire came as high as their waists, their chests, gorgeous beyond anything they'd seen, the rippling orange sheets hanging in the air like a desert mirage, like something that was there and not there. Black smoke curled above the flames, announcing to the neighborhood this very private thing that Albie had made. Fire! Fire! they'd be calling in the industrial park, even though it was already starting to die out around the edges. The fire needed so much. The boys could see it looking for more grass, anything to keep itself alive. It would have happily burned them up if it meant going for another minute.

Everybody likes Anders. But if Vogel

I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.

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

I changed along with it. Anything I thought I couldn't do turned out to be something I managed fine.

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.

He was a very small man, both in stature and girth, who had been chosen as a running mate as much for his size as for his political beliefs. The pervasive thinking in government was that a taller vice president would make the President appear weak, replaceable.

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

Neither Doyle nor Sullivan had ever been to visit him at Regina Cleri, and Tip had only come one time and then left after five minutes. To Father Sullivan it was as if this part of his family, these people whom he loved, had all packed up and gone to Africa.

The sick were a ferocious lot. They'd walk right through you if they thought that health was on the other side.

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

Every drop of rain hit the ground with such force it bounced back up again, giving the earth the appearance of something boiling.

I had no interest in starting over again, but there are some people whom we grant the role of oracle in our lives and when they speak
rarely, gravely
we are well-advised to listen.

If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need.

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.]

Time could barely pull the second hand forward on the clock ...

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.

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

I was still in high school when I decided I didn't want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my mind.

A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost.

Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left, and Odysseus left, and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys, to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we're still singing about it. Our mother left, and she came back, and we're fine. We didn't like it, but we survived it.

It was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected,

Being a childless woman of childbearing age, I am a walking target for people's concerned analysis. No one looks at a single man with a Labrador retriever and says, "Will you look at the way he throws the tennis ball to that dog? Now there's a guy who wants to have a son." A dog, after all, is man's best friend, a comrade, a pal. But give a dog to a woman and people will say she is sublimating. If she says that she, in fact, doesn't want children, they will nod understandingly and say, "You just wait." For the record, I do not speak to my dog in baby talk, nor when calling her do I say, "Come to Mama.

Question Eight: Self-righteousness is an insidious spiritual disease which is a betrayer of the gospel of grace and a great hindrance to evangelism. What is self-righteousness? Why is it such a hindrance to evangelism? How does the gospel of grace enable us to repent of our self-righteousness and free us to share the gospel with compassion? Maybe I was all right with it for a while. I read their answers, too, and in those answers Lucy and Jesus walked together as friends. The self-righteous exuded a condescending air of moral superiority that non-Christians are rightly repulsed by. I appreciated that.

Oh, my love,' she said. 'What do the only children do?'

'We'll never have to know.

We both had our first kiss from the same boy in college (a sainted and tender soul who must have made it his business to kiss the girls who would have otherwise graduated unkissed).

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.

Kentucky, a state whose capital I did not know. I had never wondered about Kentucky, never imagined it as a girl the way I had New York or Houston or Paris. No one I knew had ever been to Kentucky, or was planning on going, and so I thought it would be the last place anyone would look for me. "Tell

I decided I was going to make up a novel, and that the novel was going to get me out of the restaurant. The novel was going to be my getaway car.

At home, the puppy Rose played with balls, struggled with the stairs, and slept behind my knees while we watched in adoration. It's not that I was unhappy in what I now think of as "the dogless years," but I suspected things could be better. What I never could have imagined was how much better they would be. Whatever holes I had in my life, in my character, were suddenly filled. I had entered into my first adult relationship of mutual, unconditional love.

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.

Time is the most extraordinary gift for friendship. You'll get to eat your meals together and study together; in some cases you'll even sleep in the same room. You'll have time to waste on each other. You'll find out every single thing you have in common and still have time to catalogue all of your differences. Don't underestimate the vital necessity of friendship in your life because it is the thing that will sustain you later, when there will be considerably less time.

Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job.

She took out the bottle of Lariam and without so much as a thoughtful glance dropped it in the trash can beside her. She felt that there was something deeply flawed in her imagination that she hadn't even considered the fact that the pills could just be thrown away.

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.

Franny gave her sister a tired smile. "Oh, my love," she said. "What do the only children do?"

"We'll never have to know," Caroline said.

Was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women ...

Show kindness whenever possible. Show it to the people in front of you, the people coming up behind you, and the people with whom you are running neck and neck. It will vastly improve the quality of your own life, the lives of others, and the state of the world.