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
Like
Mouths
Decided
Package
Walking
Packages
Somebody
Plague
Virtue
Pulling
Hope
Mouth
Around
Horrible
Thing
Keeps

More quotes by 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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There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.
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Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.
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You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.
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Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.
Ann Patchett
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It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
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You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.
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Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.
Ann Patchett
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Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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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You should not have assault rifles in your home.
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.
Ann Patchett
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I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.
Ann Patchett
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Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.
Ann Patchett
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I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.
Ann Patchett
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Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
Ann Patchett
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Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.
Ann Patchett