Quote

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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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Much
Knew
Gathering
Forget
Letting
Lasts
Turned
Last
Worked
Learn
Saws
Around
Months
Ever
Information
Hard
Virtue
Forgetting

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
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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.
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I know that there are people out there who believe we should get rid of all guns.
Ann Patchett
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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.
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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.
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You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.
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Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?
Ann Patchett
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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.
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This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.
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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The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
Ann Patchett
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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