294 Quotes by Ann Patchett

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.

Isn't that what everyone wants, just for a moment to be unencumbered?

I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible.

If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side.

Oh, my love,' she said. 'What do the only children do?''We'll never have to know.

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.

...the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone...

Even the stupidest ideas have resonance once they’ve happened