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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
Keeping
Safe
Story
Tell
People

More quotes by Ann Patchett

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The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.
Ann Patchett
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There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.
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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It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.
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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The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.
Ann Patchett
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Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame
Ann Patchett
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Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.
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
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My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society.
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 seven step-siblings from my mother's second and third marriages. My degree of closeness to my step-siblings varies among the seven but I have a great sense of loyalty to all of them, especially the four from my childhood. If those people needed my help I would be there for them.
Ann Patchett
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If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.
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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Everybody believes in chance.
Ann Patchett
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Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
Ann Patchett
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Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.
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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There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.
Ann Patchett
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I am the person who is appropriating stories that are not mine and turning them into a book.
Ann Patchett