Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002 for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include Run, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, State of Wonder, and The Magician's Assistant, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and received the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award in 1994...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 December 1963
CountryUnited States of America
Ann Patchett quotes about
Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.
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.
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.
No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do
Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.
Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.
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.
Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.
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.
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!
Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.