Ann Patchett Quotes

The whole point for me is to change as much as possible. If I've done one movie, I've done that, move on.

Half my life is an act of revision.

You try things on in life. You wear them for a while, and you see what's next.

I've learned that the perfect picture that I hold in my mind of what my life looks like is constantly changing, growing, evolving. I remind myself that I am exactly where I need to be in my life; otherwise, I would surely be somewhere else.

I learn by going where I have to go.

You know, Motorcycle Diaries has no incredible stories, no sudden plot twists, it doesn't play that way. It's about recognizing that instance of change and embracing it.

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

I feel like every five to seven years I really need to put myself in this position of discomfort and exploration, just to survive. Otherwise I feel like I'm falling asleep, like I'll go crazy if I don't do it.

I'm still learning, and that's what life is about.

I'm always changing my style.

I've stopped making frocks, but not making discoveries.

I try to design into a world that is constantly moving, and moving me.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.

Life is a process of discovery, of new perceptions.

Perhaps that was the point; life, if you did it right, meant learning and changing. If you didn't, you died- or stopped growing - which amounted to more or less the same thing. So I would slide in and out of different roles until I discovered the one that fit me best. -Deuce, (183)

Man improves himself as he follows his path; if he stands still, waiting to improve before he makes a decision, he'll never move.

The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without.

Looking back at my younger self, that I'm not so different than I am now. I was always a seeker. I wanted very ambitiously to be a writer and what happened between now and then is that I continually threw myself in the way of those things that would help me become that, of doing and finding and learning from things that altered me along the way.

Life is an ongoing, never-ending process of re-creation.

People are like bicycles. They can keep their balance only as long as they keep moving.

You've got to continue to grow, or you're just like last night's cornbread - stale and dry.

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.

I'm moving - as a person and as a writer - through time. I'm a different age. I'm thinking about different things. I have different life experiences. I'm trying to get closer to being honest. And by closer I mean that at different ages I have different ideas of what the truth is, and at any point I'm trying to express that at that moment in time.

People say to you, 'you've changed', or something like that, well, I hope, for the sake of God, that you have changed, because I don't want to be the same person all my life. I want to be growing, I want to be expanding. I want to be changing. Because animate things change, inanimate things don&'t change. Dead things don't change. And the heart should be alive, it should be changing, it should be moving, it should be growing, its knowledge should be expanding.