The Patron Saint of Liars Quotes

“I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“As long as it's a regular day, not too rough to begin with, the ocean is pretty smooth once you make it out past the first set of waves. That's why people are afriad to swim in the ocean. They try to jump over those waves and get slammed down to the bottom and pulled across the sand like a piece of shell. You've got to go throught them, dive under just when they're rising up for you, set your direction, close your eyes, and just swim like hell. Once you get throught that, you'll find there isn't a better place for swimming because it's the ocean and it goes on forever. You don't have to see anyone if you don't want to. If you look out, away from the beach, it's easy to imagine that there's no one else but you in the whole world, you and maybe a couple of sea gulls.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can't pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you'd never do it, so if I went back I would never be able to leave again. Now that I knew what leaving meant.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“She's growing up," Sister Evangeline said.
And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“The only thing I wanted was a life that God did not intend for me to have. I suffered the loss of things that were never mine.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“The world is full of things we’re better off not knowing.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“People think you have to be going someplace, when, in fact, the ride is plenty.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“my mother knew that no woman thought she was beautiful, or beautiful enough, or beautiful in the right way.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“She was not one to set her teeth so far into something that she couldn’t let go when presented with the truth.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can't pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go. But at seventeen, I didn't understand, and so I left.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you’d never do it,”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“Being alone is something you have to be good at to enjoy”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“It was a time in my life when a Junior Mint could mean the difference between happiness and unhappiness.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“I loved her even as she was swimming away from me, even as I was hating her. That’s the way it is, when you’ve loved somebody your whole life. It’s like a direction you go in, even when you don’t want to go anymore.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“They look into the mirror and all they can see is a collection of flaws,”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“I imagined that it was possible for people to have talents, great talents, that they never stumbled across in the course of their lives.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“Without worry to protect me, every thought that came into my mind received real attention.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“I was somewhere outside of Ludlow, California, headed due east toward Kentucky ,whenI realized that I would be a liar for the rest of my life”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“If people do have more than one life in a lifetime, they should be careful to make sure the different versions of the past never overlap.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“Memory is a wicked thing that warps and twists. But paper and ink receive the truth without emotion, and they read it back without partiality. That, I believe, is why so few women are taught to read and write. God only knows what they would do with the power of pen and ink at their disposal.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“The love for a woman and the love for a child are not the same thing. With a woman, there's always the sense they're loaning themselves to you. You have to remember that they could go at any time, and if a man's smart he never forgets that.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“Anyone who knew her at all could see she was a leaver, that she wouldn't know a thing about what it's like to be left.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“sat in my wheelchair and kept my eyes trained on the swinging doors at the end of the hall. Any minute now she’d walk through them and I’d go right up to her and tell her she could go to hell for all I cared. She’d done a rotten job. She had never for a minute put me first. Jesus, look around you, I’d say to her. Saint Elizabeth’s is full of girls who can’t raise their children. At least they’re kind enough to give them away.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“wanted to sit down in the middle of the road and stay there for the rest of my life. Whenever someone came by and said, Hey, Cecilia, what’re you doing there in the road, I’d tell them, missing people was a full-time job, being sorry about what was gone was going to take every waking minute now, so much time and energy that I had no choice but to stay right on that spot until they all decided to come back. I meant it as a joke at first, but then I looked down at the gravel and I really thought about it. I couldn’t wait for them. They weren’t coming back. I’d been trying all my life to figure out what was going on, with my mother, with all those girls that come and then go away. But now I wanted to forget. Right then I decided, as much as I’d wanted to know before, from here on out I didn’t want to know at all.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“equation at all. She’d never been”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can’t pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars