Quote

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

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Thing
Keeps
Like
Mouths
Decided
Package
Walking
Packages
Somebody
Plague
Virtue
Pulling
Hope
Mouth
Around
Horrible

More quotes by 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.]
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I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.
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It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
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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.
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The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.
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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.
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Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.
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Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.
Ann Patchett
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Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.
Ann Patchett
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Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.
Ann Patchett
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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.
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.
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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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The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.
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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Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.
Ann Patchett
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I'm very comfortable writing.
Ann Patchett
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Fiction is always really a labor.
Ann Patchett
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Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
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