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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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Ann Patchett
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Catholic
Fate
Certainly
Sort
Chance
Believe
Think
Thinking
Predestination

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.
Ann Patchett
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Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
Ann Patchett
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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.
Ann Patchett
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Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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
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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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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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I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.
Ann Patchett
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I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.
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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The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.
Ann Patchett
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Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.
Ann Patchett
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Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.
Ann Patchett
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I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.
Ann Patchett
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No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do
Ann Patchett
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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
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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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I always used to be an inside person, and now I'm an outside person.
Ann Patchett
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The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.
Ann Patchett