Jeanette Quotes

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

After every ''victory'' you have more enemies.

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Never accept other people's limited perceptions of you. Define yourself. You can do anything.

You get out what you put in. If you want more, give more.

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.

Passion and hard work makes a great player, but the courage to get up every time you fall is what makes a champion.

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

One of the most powerful things you can do is take responsibility for your life. Your choices. Your actions. Your Life.

Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.

I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.

When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.

If people aren't educated, they can't question. If they can't question, they can't change anything, which is great for the status quo and all the people who can question them at their own level.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

Life must be lived with courage, with climbing and risks, else there is no happiness, no hope, no true success, no future.

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

I'm sure that people must say about me, on the screen, 'Good gracious, is Jeanette MacDonald going to take off her clothes - again?

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

Language is a finding place, not a hiding place.

I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial.

We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that's true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.

History is not a suicide note -- it is a record of our survival.

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

Reading is where the wild things are.