Quote

But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Person
Parts
Take
Ones
Life
Story
Purpose
Another
Purposes
Cannot
Suit
Stories
Suits
Persons
Forth

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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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.
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The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.
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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.
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You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.
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Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.
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I am a totally public person.
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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.
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No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.
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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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Everybody believes in chance.
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.
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Well, I always say that the two things I was most disastrous at in my life, being a teenager and being a wife, were the two things I really wound up cashing in on when I was writing fluffy magazine pieces.
Ann Patchett
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I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.
Ann Patchett
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When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
Ann Patchett
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I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.
Ann Patchett
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It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
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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If you're trying to find out what's coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.
Ann Patchett
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If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.
Ann Patchett
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Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
Ann Patchett