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Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Time
Compresses
Dense
Bright
Happiness
Makes

More quotes by 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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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
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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.
Ann Patchett
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The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.
Ann Patchett
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I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.
Ann Patchett
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The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.
Ann Patchett
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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.
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 am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.
Ann Patchett
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Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.
Ann Patchett
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The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.
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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Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?
Ann Patchett
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If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.
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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No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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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
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When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
Ann Patchett