I believe this part from Paul Graham's quote is important:
[...] I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough-- often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write [...]
It shows that if you can build these abstractions in your language (and you can do pretty much anything with Lisp, which is what he probably has in mind saying the above), you don't need to model them with patterns.
But not everybody uses Lisp, so you will only be able to build abstractions where you can, and use patterns where you can't. As an example, in languages without higher-order functions, these are often modeled using the strategy pattern.
It seems to be a matter of how you look at it: the pattern can be seen as a symptom of a problem (e.g. the lack of higher-order functions), or as a solution of the problem (e.g. making something like higher-order functions possible via the strategy pattern).
