Ann Patchett quotes:

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.

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.

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.

Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.

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.

the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I will write my way into another life.

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.

Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.

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.]

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together.

...the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone...

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.

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

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.

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.

I am a totally public person.

If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, "No. That is not where I want to go."

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

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

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.

I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.

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 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.

I'm very comfortable writing.

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

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

Fiction is always really a labor.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

That's important to me, to recommend books.

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

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

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.

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

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

From my table inside I watch the glamorous women outside who are lunching on Spa Cobb salads without blue cheese or dressing. The man with the bread basket wanders from table to table, lonesome as a cloud. When he comes to me his basket is full and perfectly arranged. He gives me a smile of sincere pleasure when I tell him I will take both the sourdough roll and the cheese stick.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.

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

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.

It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.

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

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

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.

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

You should not have assault rifles in your home.

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

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

I know that there are people out there who believe we should get rid of all guns.

Everyone knows everything eventually.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.

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.

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

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.

I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.