Ann Patchett famous quotes

03-22-2025

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.
-- Ann Patchett

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

#Focused
Sometimes not having any idea where weâ€™re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
-- Ann Patchett

#Ideas #Work Out #Sometimes
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?
-- Ann Patchett

#Writing #Emotional #Space
It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
-- Ann Patchett

#Done #Might #Brilliant
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.
-- Ann Patchett

#Reading #Character #Mean
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.
-- Ann Patchett

#Live Life #Book #Reading
Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
-- Ann Patchett

#Art #Writing #Discipline
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
-- Ann Patchett

#Book #Reading #Giving
The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
-- Ann Patchett

#Quality #Sincerity #Giver
Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.
-- Ann Patchett

#Feelings #Singing #Moved
In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.
-- Ann Patchett

#Stories #Facts #This Life
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

#Disappointment #Writing #Heart
It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
-- Ann Patchett

#Too Much #Enough
I will write my way into another life.
-- Ann Patchett

#Writing #Way #Another Life
You are always someones favorite unfolding story
-- Ann Patchett

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

#Writing #World #Awful
Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.
-- Ann Patchett

#Writing #Dots #Coming Back
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.
-- Ann Patchett

#Love #Kissing #Two
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.
-- Ann Patchett

#Mouths #Virtue #Horrible
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.
-- Ann Patchett

#Fate #Doors #Long
One must not be shy where language is concerned.
-- Ann Patchett

#Shy #Language #Concerned
Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
-- Ann Patchett

#Book #Writing #Want
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.
-- Ann Patchett

#Opportunity #Tchaikovsky #True Life
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.
-- Ann Patchett

#Skills #Two #Giving

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