Ann Patchett Quotes - Page 6

I always used to be an inside person, and now I'm an outside person.

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

I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

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.

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.]

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

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.

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

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

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.

Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.

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.

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

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.

You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no.

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.

No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.