Jeanette Quotes

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun.

However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

I've never been tempted by God but I like his trappings.

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us.

I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.

Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don't give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it.

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

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

Reading is where the wild things are.

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.

Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.

If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.

It is a happy woman when the spirit time is come, that finds herself in the presence of a good man.

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.

When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.

We are all historians in our small way.

As your lover describes you, so you are.

I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.

How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are?

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.

Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.

I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.

I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving.

Life was a pre-death experience.

You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue.

I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?