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Show kindness whenever possible. Show it to the people in front of you, the people coming up behind you, and the people with whom you are running neck and neck. It will vastly improve the quality of your own life, the lives of others, and the state of the world.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
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LA
California
Running
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Vastly
Others
Behind
Neck
Shows
Coming
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Quality
Improve
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Possible
Whenever
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Kindness
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More quotes by Ann Patchett

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I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.
Ann Patchett
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That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down.
Ann Patchett
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Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.
Ann Patchett
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I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.
Ann Patchett
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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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Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
Ann Patchett
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Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.
Ann Patchett
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You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.
Ann Patchett
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We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.
Ann Patchett
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Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
Ann Patchett
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If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, No. That is not where I want to go.
Ann Patchett
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Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
Ann Patchett
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There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.
Ann Patchett
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Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.
Ann Patchett
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I am sure every writer has this and probably every newscaster, that people are always coming up to me and saying, my daughter wants to do what you do, my godson, my tennis partner.
Ann Patchett
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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
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I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.
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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Everyone knows everything eventually.
Ann Patchett
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I am a totally public person.
Ann Patchett