Quote

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

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Life
Wasn
Maybe
Forever
Everyone
Lives
Remembering
Remember
Spent
Littles
Private
Little
Rest

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.
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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.
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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.
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I will write my way into another life.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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
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One must not be shy where language is concerned.
Ann Patchett
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The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Ann Patchett
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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
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I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.
Ann Patchett
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Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
Ann Patchett
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Fiction is always really a labor.
Ann Patchett
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You are always someones favorite unfolding story
Ann Patchett
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If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.
Ann Patchett