Quote

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.]

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
Summer
Begin
Start
Fall
Beautiful
Ends
Intersects
Would
Perfectly
Explain

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.
Ann Patchett
Image
The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, You have no need for sight. Listen.
Ann Patchett
Image
I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.
Ann Patchett
Image
I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
Ann Patchett
Image
He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!
Ann Patchett
Image
Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
Ann Patchett
Image
Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.
Ann Patchett
Image
It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.
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
Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.
Ann Patchett
Image
I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.
Ann Patchett
Image
It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
Ann Patchett
Image
It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
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
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
Learn to write by writing
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett