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

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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You can't say, I'm too busy writing to be political. You are one person.
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Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.
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Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
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People gave me such a bad time about wanting a baby. I didn't want a baby, and I still don't. I wanted a dog.
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I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.
Ann Patchett
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Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
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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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The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.
Ann Patchett
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Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?
Ann Patchett
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I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.
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No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
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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.
Ann Patchett
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Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.
Ann Patchett
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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
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I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.
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 think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.
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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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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That's one of the many things about having the bookstore that I adore. I can walk into the store and say to somebody, I'm glad you're reading this book or I'm glad you're getting this book or Don't get that book. I read that book and hated that book. Let's get you this book instead.
Ann Patchett