Quotes by Ann Patchett

Its like a big circle. Ive gone on a get-a-man crusade, but so far its been a disaster and Im feeling as bad about myself as I ever have. I know Im a great person and all that, a good friend, but I feel like real bottom of the barrel girlfriend material.

If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.

If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucys circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She was, in a sense, sitting at a craps table with her last stack of chips, trying again and again to hit it big.

What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that its the closest thing to being God youre ever going to get. All the decisions are yours. You decide when the sun comes up. You decide who gets to fall in love and who gets hit by a car. You have to make all the trees and all the leaves and then sew the leaves onto the trees. You make the entire world.

Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the worlds unhappiness on the advent of calculators.

...as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.

They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them.

But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.

Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that Gods own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting, warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God in heaven. It was a miracle and he wept for the gift of bearing witness.

Somebodys going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.Theyre free, Franny said. I check them out of the library.Well, thank God for libraries, Caroline said.

...was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...

“We had invented time, and we could not kill it fast enough. After dinner, dancing, and baths, we read, wrote our poems and stories, brushed our teeth, and tumbled into bed, only to find the next day was exactly the same. We had not moved one inch forward in the night. It was like prison, not in the punishment but in the vast sameness of the days. We were impossibly rich in time, and we lavished the excess on one another.”

“He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.”