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If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, No. That is not where I want to go.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Looks
Going
Years
Would
Paperwork
Life
Shown
Anybody
Five
Look

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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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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You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.
Ann Patchett
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I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.
Ann Patchett
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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
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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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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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The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.
Ann Patchett
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She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.
Ann Patchett
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We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.
Ann Patchett
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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. 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
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My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.
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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Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.
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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I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.
Ann Patchett
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I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.
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 someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.
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 was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.
Ann Patchett