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It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Things
Opened
Hands
Remember
Might
Work
Much

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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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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Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.
Ann Patchett
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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
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Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
Ann Patchett
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People always say, Can writing be taught? I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.
Ann Patchett
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I always used to be an inside person, and now I'm an outside person.
Ann Patchett
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I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.
Ann Patchett
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Home, bed, sleep, mother--who knew more beautiful words than these?
Ann Patchett
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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
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I'm very comfortable writing.
Ann Patchett
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I have seven step-siblings from my mother's second and third marriages. My degree of closeness to my step-siblings varies among the seven but I have a great sense of loyalty to all of them, especially the four from my childhood. If those people needed my help I would be there for them.
Ann Patchett
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I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.
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
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Learn to write by writing
Ann Patchett
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shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
Ann Patchett
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It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.
Ann Patchett
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I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me.
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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I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.
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