Ann Patchett Quotes

Well, I would have much preferred to have had a normal childhood. I would have loved it if my greatest dilemma, at 14, was whether to go to Benetton for my pullovers. I would have preferred not to have cried all the tears I have cried.

I hate the past - especially my own past.

If you wanted to torture me, you'd tie me down and force me to watch our first five videos.

Clothes have memories, and sometimes you don't want to remember. People remember where they bought the clothes, who gave them, or where they stole them from.

It's a painful thing to talk about my childhood. I kind of don't talk about it much.

My parents sold my childhood home, and I literally was 35 years old, but I cried for, like, two and a half weeks. Like, openly wailed.

My childhood went on far too long.

Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

The past was so past it hurt.

My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.

No matter what you tell me, no matter how legitimate your reasons, I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can't do it because it really happened, they are part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self.

I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror.

I was shaking all over, and it wasn't from the vampire. Memories have teeth, too.

Every mile was redolent of associations, which she would not have missed for the world, but each of which made her cry upon 'the days that are no more' with ineffable longing.

I could never have a mistress, because I couldn't bear to tell the story of my life all over again.

I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again. Ever. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. What is there to say? There are no words. I'll never understand why it happened to us.

Memory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon on puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go.. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten.

It was stressful [to live as a child in a Sylvian Hills]. It's always been complicated, honestly... I do not really want to tell you, actually. It bothers me that you want me to tell this.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

Too much to take in, too much to purge. Why must every memory, once sweet, dead end in such ugliness?

Do you ever think of moving back?" "To Coldwater? Heck, no. England suits me fine. These Brits love my accent. The first time Gavin asked me out it was just to hear me talk. Lucky for him, it's one of the things I do best." All teasing left her eyes. "Too many memories back home. Can't drive down the street without thinking I see Scott in the crowd.

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.