Ann patchett quotes

People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappointment them, or, if they do, the owners manages 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.

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.

I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels more noble.

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.

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.

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.

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

I will write my way into another life.

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.

The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.

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.

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.

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.

You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person.

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. … It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.

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

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

reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

When you get divorced and remarried, nobody gets discarded. Everybody is still there. Even if their storyline is not directly yours.

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.

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

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.

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

For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.

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.

Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.

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.

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

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

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

Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I've found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

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

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.

The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me.

I think that people all grow up and have their same personalities, but you can say, "Oh, I can see the roots of this personality, which I didn't like, but then you grew up, and I can still see you as that person, but I do really like you now." Which is sort of how I feel about children - I mean, about children who I knew when I was a child and grew up with, and they're still my friends, and children that I know as children who I see growing up, and every year I like them more.

I'm very comfortable writing.

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

I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.

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.

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

People always say, "Can writing be taught?" I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.

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

It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.

Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame

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.

Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.

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

Fiction is always really a labor.

I don't really do anything with the Internet except check my email. I have a much higher opinion of humanity because of that.

We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.

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

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.

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

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.

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.

If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.

That's one of the many things about having the bookstore that I adore. I can walk into the store and say to somebody, "I'm glad you're reading this book" or "I'm glad you're getting this book" or "Don't get that book. I read that book and hated that book. Let's get you this book instead."

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

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.

I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.

Everyone knows everything eventually.

You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.

Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.

Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.

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?

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.

You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.

I am a totally public person.

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

I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.

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

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.

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.

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

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

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

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

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

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

Learn to write by writing

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

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.

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

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

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.

I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.

He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.

If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.

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

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.

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.

If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.

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.

There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.

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.

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.

I am sure every writer has this and probably every newscaster, that people are always coming up to me and saying, my daughter wants to do what you do, my godson, my tennis partner.

The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.

I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.

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.

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, 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.

When I am emperor, I will abolish private education. Private schools, private college. All of these parents with money and energy and the drive for bake sales and a desire to leave their vast fortunes to education - everybody would have to be eating out of the same educational pot.

You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature.

Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.

I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.

You should not have assault rifles in your home.

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.

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.

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

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.