The entire time Alfie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as “the stripper soundtrack

— Ann Patchett

The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.

— Ann Patchett

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly is always the love that is not returned.

— Ann Patchett

The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

— Ann Patchett

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 Lucy's 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.

— Ann Patchett

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

— Ann Patchett

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

— Ann Patchett

There was no time for kissing, but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.

— Ann Patchett

The sleep he went back to was never the one he left.

— Ann Patchett

... the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.

— Ann Patchett