Jeanette Quotes

I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.

There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that.

Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.

It is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

There are voices and they must be heard.

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python.

Life gives you enough hard knocks so it's unlikely you'll stay that sure of yourself.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.

It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.

I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.

I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.

I want to get to the end and feel that I've done all I could, given the limitations and given the opportunities.

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it's not arrogant.

As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can.

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.

Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not.

Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality.

You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge.

It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

St. Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry.

Those who are determined to succeed are those who eventually succeed.

Your life may not have gone the way you planned it, but it will go the way it's supposed to.

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

The wider we read the freer we become.

On the other side of fear is your breakthrough.

I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

Often the greatest progress happen in the most difficult of times.

Eating was easy. Thinking was hard.

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