Jeanette Quotes

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

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.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

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

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

To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.

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

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, you'll still have your stars.

We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.

Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.

Saddest of all are the women who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue. They made the sacrifice, often willingly, and they are still waiting for the blessing.

I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings.

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.

Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.

I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.

What I want does exist if I dare to find it.

I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

The free man never thinks of escape.

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

She was a monster, but she was my monster.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.

Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.

I wanted to cause trouble, but I know now it stays with you.

Passion is not well bred.

Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.

The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.