Quote

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.

Ann Patchett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Nothing
Happened
Much
Looking
Way
Fighting
Things
Moment
Would
Bigs
Moments
Knock
Thought
Worked
Everything
Fight

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
Ann Patchett
Image
I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.
Ann Patchett
Image
I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.
Ann Patchett
Image
In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.
Ann Patchett
Image
Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom.
Ann Patchett
Image
I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.
Ann Patchett
Image
It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
Ann Patchett
Image
I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett
Image
You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.
Ann Patchett