Jane Hamilton Quotes

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

It must be strange to keep your strong mind in a body that grows older and weaker and no longer resembles your own image of yourself.

The last rain had come at the beginning of April and now, at the first of June, all but the hardiest mosquitoes had left their papery skins in the grass. It was already seven o'clock in the morning, long past time to close windows and doors, trap what was left of the night air slightly cooler only by virtue of the dark. The dust on the gravel had just enough energy to drift a short distance and then collapse on the flower beds. The sun had a white cast, as if shade and shadow, any flicker of nuance, had been burned out by its own fierce center. There would be no late afternoon gold, no pale early morning yellow, no flaming orange at sunset. If the plants had vocal cords they would sing their holy dirges like slaves.

Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated. I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets.

We are part of each other's live in much the same way a lover is only slightly beneath closed lids in sleep.

In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

In the larger world, tribalism is an enormous problem, as it ever has been: both strength and idiocy borne from belonging.

I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

People want to be artists but don't want to do the ground work.

In May, when the grass was so green it hurt to look at it, the air so overpoweringly sweet you had to go in and turn on the television just to dull your senses- that's when Claire knew it was time to look for the asparagus in the pastures. If it rained she wondered if she should check our secret places for morels. In June, when the strawberries ripened, we made hay and the girls rode on top of the wagon. I was ever mindful of the boy who had fallen off and broken his neck. In July, the pink raspberries, all in brambles in the woods and growing up our front porch, turned black and tart. In August, the sour apples were the coming thing. In September there were the crippled-up pears in the old orchard. In October, we picked the pumpkin and popcorn. And all winter, when there was snow, we lived for the wild trip down the slopes on the toboggan.

This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer.

She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.

I've always broken out in hives when I go into any organized religious situation.

I spent my entire youth being in love with gay men because they were the most interesting and compassionate people I knew.

The magical descriptions of Italy and hilarious observations about love, travel, natives and foreigners in Love in Idleness are but a few of its many pleasures. Amanda Craig has created a hot shimmery climate in which a cast of old friends, quirky family members and naughty children who make love potions come to know themselves and their hearts. A delightful brew.

A lot of the people of the Midwest came from the Northeast. We're of the same stock. Yet something must have happened when we crossed the Ohio River Valley because I have sensed that there's more of an openness and flexibility of spirit out West.

We didn't have a TV until I was 12.

It was impossible not to admire him, not to want to do something to contain that kind of beauty- drink him, ingest him, sneak into his shirt and hide for the rest of one's natural life.

I didn't know how to tell him that I hadn't lost the instinct to survive and yet at the same time I didn't feel much need for self-preservation, that somehow there was a distinction between the two.

I will hear a noise, like a fish jumping, and when I look I'll see Lizzy coming to the surface, shaking off her pink scales, finding her new arms to do the breaststroke to shore.

I don't think that talking to anybody can help you - a writer or a nonwriter. So what do I do in Wisconsin? I don't know. I just slug through it.

He thought there must be a place, like a dead-letter office, where everyone's longing went, yearning that was sent out, day after day. He thought it must collect somewhere, in a dank basement room, the mass of it rising and rising like water, and with no end in sight.

As a species, we would not have survived without humor.

Sometimes people choose one person in a crowd to pick at. It makes them feel better to say how there's one entirely rotten person they can blame everything on.

There were so many miracles at work: that a blossom might become a peach, that a bee could make honey in its thorax, that rain might someday fall. I thought then about the seasons changing, and in the gray of night I could almost will myself to see the azure sky, the gold of the maple leaves, the crimson of the ripe apples, the hoarfrost on the grass.

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.

I have since wondered if a person can know how deep a thing goes without getting outside of it, without taking it apart, without, in fact, ruining it.

All I hope, selfishly, is that there will be real books until the day I draw my last breath.

Miss Finch said she meant to listen to new books as well as her old favorites, even the ones that pierced her heart, before she departed this world.

Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.

He wondered if somewhere far off, defying the laws of science, Mitch's two screams were still echoing, if those vibrations had traveled into space, if they moved on and on like rays in a light-year. There might be other forms of life who were receiving the noise and trying to interpret the tones.

She could never be part of so much of his turbulent history, his youthful adventure, where life had been deeply felt.

It is a rule of nature that taking a day off on the farm sets a person back at least a week.

I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.

In Charles Dickens's books I had to admire the way the meanest enemies spoke to each other, with what seemed to me to be the greatest civility.

I have always thought that work is as common and fine as air, something that we become a part of. I am drawn to the out of doors, to the ordinary pleasures of everyday work. Alice used to say that if I was a bird I'd be the first one to sing, the wayward robin who's cranking it up before a ray of light gives anyone allowance.

I just assumed that if you were a girl-child, you were supposed to grow up and write.

The law of thermodynamics, you know, the idea that nothing is lost, that a loss in one area equals a gain in the other, was actually not invented by scientists but by the people who write redemptive fiction. [...] Actually, in real life, we lose things all the time and they're gone. Lost, period.

I don't mean it to sound egomaniacal, but in a way, for me, it was very useful to imagine that I was the only one who was taking pen in hand. I'd always been told that it was impossible to be published, so I was writing only for myself.

I knew that we were two humans, that's all, two humans walking around blindly in the night, looking for a warm hand.

He wore binoculars around his neck the way librarians wear their glasses.

I looked up then, out the far window, and there, just within sight, the sun was going down across the river. It was dull red, no longer shining over the land, its ray brought home to roost, contained within its sphere. The sky was streaked with lavendar, a pulsing pale blue, purple and smudged pink and orange melding into one another all the way to the horizon.

You have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help ... And then finally, the way through grief is grieving.

Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.