Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.
—Ann Patchett
Just because things hadn’t gone the way I had planned didn’t necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
—Ann Patchett
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
Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
—Ann Patchett
For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. 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.
—Ann Patchett
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.
—Ann Patchett
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
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.
—Ann Patchett
The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
—Ann Patchett
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.
—Ann Patchett
I believe that my gift in this world is not that I’m smarter or more talented than anyone else: it’s that I had a singular goal. I don’t want other stuff: friends, kids, travel. What makes me happy is writing.
—Ann Patchett
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.
—Ann Patchett
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.
—Ann Patchett
When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought i would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.
—Ann Patchett
Topics: Worry
There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.
—Ann Patchett
You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself.
—Ann Patchett
Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.
—Ann Patchett
But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.
—Ann Patchett
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.
—Ann Patchett
Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.
—Ann Patchett
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.
—Ann Patchett
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.
—Ann Patchett
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Andre Norton American Science Fiction Writer
- Alice Walker American Novelist, Activist
- Isabel Allende Chilean Novelist
- Annie Dillard American Writer
- Maxine Hong Kingston American Novelist, Memoirist
- Joyce Maynard American Novelist
- Anne Lamott American Writer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
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