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If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
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LA
California
Trying
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More quotes by Ann Patchett

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Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
Ann Patchett
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In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.
Ann Patchett
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Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
Ann Patchett
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You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen.
Ann Patchett
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It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
Ann Patchett
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For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.
Ann Patchett
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The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, You have no need for sight. Listen.
Ann Patchett
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When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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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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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Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
Ann Patchett
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I am a totally public person.
Ann Patchett
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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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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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The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the grocery store are the one's I wind up writing about.
Ann Patchett
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I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.
Ann Patchett
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Learn to write by writing
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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Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.
Ann Patchett