Quote

Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

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
Ideas
Better
Sometimes
Going
Imagined
Possibly
Works
Idea

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.
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
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.
Ann Patchett
Image
Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
Ann Patchett
Image
You can't say, I'm too busy writing to be political. You are one person.
Ann Patchett
Image
Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.
Ann Patchett
Image
No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
Ann Patchett
Image
If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.
Ann Patchett
Image
If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.
Ann Patchett
Image
I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.
Ann Patchett
Image
I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.
Ann Patchett
Image
I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.
Ann Patchett
Image
Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
Ann Patchett
Image
I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
Ann Patchett
Image
For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.
Ann Patchett
Image
Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
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
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
She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.
Ann Patchett