Quote

You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.

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
Everything
Enough
Sadness
Much
Pick
World
Picks
Places
Behinds
Behind
Leave

More quotes by Ann Patchett

Image
It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.
Ann Patchett
Image
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
Image
I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.
Ann Patchett
Image
That's important to me, to recommend books.
Ann Patchett
Image
You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend. You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer. You can't say, I'm too busy writing to be political. You are one person. You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.
Ann Patchett
Image
If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.
Ann Patchett
Image
Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.
Ann Patchett
Image
Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
Ann Patchett
Image
That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down.
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
You are always someones favorite unfolding story
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
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
It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
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
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
shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us
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 am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.
Ann Patchett
Image
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.
Ann Patchett