294 Quotes by Ann Patchett

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.

We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.

No one could see her objectively anyway. Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing. Found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and so poured like light though her skin. Then all that could be seen was the weight and the gloss of her hair and the pale pink of her cheeks and her beautiful hands.

...I came to see that there was something liberating about failure and humiliation. Life as I had known it had been destroyed so completely, so publicly, that in a way I was free, as I imagine anyone who walks away from a crash is free. I didn't have expectations anymore, and no one seemed to expect anything from me. I believed that nothing short of a speeding car could kill me. I knew there was nothing I couldn't give up.

Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.""They're free," Franny said. "I check them out of the library.""Well, thank God for libraries," Caroline said.

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

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 world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.

Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It's not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.