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I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Around
Used
Everything
Writing
Life
Quiet
Wall
Write
Keep

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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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
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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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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
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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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It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.
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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Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere.
Ann Patchett
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Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom.
Ann Patchett
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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
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Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.
Ann Patchett
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My writing process has changed because it's harder to find uninterrupted time.
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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But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.
Ann Patchett
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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
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You are always someones favorite unfolding story
Ann Patchett
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It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
Ann Patchett
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It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.
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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I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.
Ann Patchett
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I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.
Ann Patchett