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Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.

Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: November 2
Author
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Safe
Story
Tell
People
Keeping

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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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.
Ann Patchett
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You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.
Ann Patchett
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Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
Ann Patchett
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You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer.
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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When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
Ann Patchett
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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
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I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.
Ann Patchett
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Even though I didn't know I was applying for the job, I have somehow become the spokesperson for independent book stores.
Ann Patchett
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It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
Ann Patchett
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I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.
Ann Patchett
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I am not mature enough as a reader to enjoy a book in which I hate all the people.
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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No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.
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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I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.
Ann Patchett
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I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
Ann Patchett
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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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Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.
Ann Patchett
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He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!
Ann Patchett