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There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Cruel
Goodness
Fortune
Personal
Something
Good
People
Equate

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.
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There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.
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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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Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
Ann Patchett
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The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.
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.
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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
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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 craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.
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.
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I'm very comfortable writing.
Ann Patchett
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Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.
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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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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No one should have to go back to the place where she had once been a girl.
Ann Patchett
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You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no.
Ann Patchett
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That's important to me, to recommend books.
Ann Patchett