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

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Knew
Wonder
Lives
Makes
Might
Done
Things
Suspected
Brilliant

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
Ann Patchett
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I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.]
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
Ann Patchett
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Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
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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Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.
Ann Patchett
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He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.
Ann Patchett
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Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett