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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
I tend to keep my ideas in my head. When I write something down in a notebook it's never centralized. There are too many notebooks floating around, but maybe that's a good thing.
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
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
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
Image
I will write my way into another life.
Ann Patchett
Image
My writing process has changed because it's harder to find uninterrupted time.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.
Ann Patchett
Image
I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Ann Patchett
Image
One must not be shy where language is concerned.
Ann Patchett
Image
Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
Ann Patchett
Image
If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.
Ann Patchett
Image
Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
Fiction is always really a labor.
Ann Patchett
Image
Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom.
Ann Patchett