Ann > Ann's Quotes

“He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult.”
― John Banville, The Book of Evidence

“She loved nothing in the world except this woman’s son, wanted him alive more than anybody, but hadn’t the least bit of control over the predator that lived inside her. Totally taken over by her anaconda love, she had no self left, no fears, no wants, no intelligence that was her own.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“You learn things about characters as you write them, so even if you think you know where things are heading, don’t set it in stone; you might change your mind. You have to let the action progress the way it must, not the way you want it to. You create an order for the universe and then you set that universe in motion.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“When I went in again the little house had suddenly grown lonely, and my room looked empty as it had the day I came. I and all my belongings had died out of it, and I knew how it would seem when Mrs. Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

“We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“don’t worry, work, and have faith that all answers will be found there.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“It is youth’s gift not to feel its debts.”
― Madeline Miller

“The fame she had described was what all mortals yearn for. It is their only hope of immortality”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“and she found things in her memory that she hadn’t been fully aware of, things that had lain unexamined and unfelt inside of her for all these years.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“He used his delicate sorrows as a battering ram, smashing his way into people’s hearts, where he could reside until he was bored, taking what he wanted.”
― Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island

“When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later … later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence.”
― Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch: A novel