Ann Patchett Quotes - Page 7

Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.

From my table inside I watch the glamorous women outside who are lunching on Spa Cobb salads without blue cheese or dressing. The man with the bread basket wanders from table to table, lonesome as a cloud. When he comes to me his basket is full and perfectly arranged. He gives me a smile of sincere pleasure when I tell him I will take both the sourdough roll and the cheese stick.

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.

I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.

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

It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.

Everybody believes in chance.

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.

If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.

I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.

That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.

You can't spend your whole life in front of a screen.

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.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

I know where I'm going. And if I don't know where I'm going, I don't tend to get anywhere.

Fiction is always really a labor.

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.

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.

My writing process has changed because it's harder to find uninterrupted time.

Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.

I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels more noble.

I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.

I tend to keep my ideas in my head. When I write something down in a notebook it's never centralized. There are too many notebooks floating around, but maybe that's a good thing.