Jane Green Quotes

I think relationships are very difficult. It's very easy to get swept away with excitement, glamour, and passion. I think the trick is to look for friendship rather than passion. ~ Jane Green

Under Polly's eyes, her gaunt cheeks, and her shaking hands as she poured the tea. * * * Cat watches as her cab winds its way through the streets of Soho, thinking she would never stoop to that. It's the lowest of the low. We're supposed to be features writers, not news hacks. But behind her mutterings, behind her disdain, as unwilling as she is to admit it, lies a ribbon of insecurity. The Daily Gazette is the best paper she could ever imagine working for, but Cat, just past her mid-twenties, has yet to prove herself with a big story. She's proving adept at the smaller fluff pieces - How to wear a scarf in thirty different ways! How to put the romance back into your marriage! (As if she would know anything about that.) How to revamp your wardrobe in five easy steps! But the big interviews, the ones that Poppy ~ Jane Green

When it's just sex, you're allowed to be predatory, to make the first move, to entice them into bed, because it's not necessary to make them fall in love with you. ~ Jane Green

When I'm single, I'm this fabulous, independent, confident woman, and then I get involved with one disastrous man after another and I turn into this needy, insecure, fearful girl who becomes frightened of her own shadow. ~ Jane Green

Taking a risk is always frightening, but I gave myself a set period of time and had enough money to see me through. I operated from the belief that things would be okay, that if I wasn't successful I would find myself a job, but either way, I would be fine. ~ Jane Green

My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers. ~ Jane Green

The place she felt happiest, the place she found her solace and joy, was in the pages of books. She ~ Jane Green

A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on ... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller. ~ Jane Green

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel. ~ Jane Green

Life, Steffi has learned, carries on around the pain, making room for it, absorbing it until it becomes part of the daily fabric, wrapping itself around you and lodging itself in your heart. ~ Jane Green

I had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London. ~ Jane Green

As someone who is displaced - I left London almost fifteen years ago to make Connecticut my home - I am drawn to stories about people who don't belong, whether physically or emotionally, and who find their families of choice in their friends. ~ Jane Green

I cannot believe that I am actually excited at the sight of him. It has been long since anyone has made me feel THIS ... and even though I know I've avoided THIS for fear of getting hurt, there's something about him that makes me want to trust him. ~ Jane Green

I believe it is the flaws that make us interesting, our backgrounds, the hardships. ~ Jane Green

Life is so easy when you are young, she thinks. You can say and do almost anything, safe in the knowledge that an apology will make everything better. The older you get, the more impact those harmful words and deeds have. Once said, those words cannot be unspoken. ~ Jane Green

I am not someone who's very good at looking after herself, and I am also not someone who goes on holiday very often. ~ Jane Green

I love the English language, playing with words, watching sentences fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, ~ Jane Green

I believed our touching to be more intense because of it's very holding back. Belief is always a choice. ~ Jane Green

I am not a people pleaser. I am not a person who says things because she thinks it will make the other person happy, nor am I a person who offers things she cannot deliver because I want the other person to like me. ~ Jane Green

And then there was him, the long and painful love of her life. ~ Jane Green

I know plenty of people with kids in elite, private schools and had heard many stories. I have drifted into the homes of some of those very wealthy families in New York and am fascinated with the dynamic and how much freedom the children are given. ~ Jane Green

No!" Sally said. "I didn't want you here in the first place. Why are you here? What do you want from me? Do you want to take my stuff?" She snatched the tiara from her head and cradled it against her chest. "Is that it? You think you can come here and help yourself to my pre- cious jewels? Get out of here! I can't stand you, Grace. 1 never could. Always whining, whining, whining. Why are you here? What do you want from me? You always ~ Jane Green

Love is love, Nell, in whatever form or shape it comes and those of us who have found it must not let anything get in the way. ~ Jane Green

No, really, it's fine, says the woman, getting up to leave. ~ Jane Green

Loving she realises is a verb. It is an act. It is not enough to say you love someone, and then forget about them, or trust a relationship will stay strong simply because you share a house or children or a life.
Loving requires acts of love. It requires thinking of your spouse, doing things for them to make them happy. It requires acting in loving ways, even when you are tired, or bogged down with work, or so stressed you are waking up every night with a jaw sore from grinding your teeth.
They forgot to do that, she now knows. They forgot to love each other. They expected love to continue, without putting any work into it, and today she knows this is why her marriage failed. ~ Jane Green

I do what most women do. I meet someone and some of it's right, maybe he looks right, or has the right job, or the right background, and, instead of sitting back and waiting for him to reveal his other bits, I make them up. I decide how he thinks, how he's going to treat me, and, sure enough, every time I conclude that this time he's definitely my perfect man, and all of a sudden, well, not so suddenly perhaps, usually around six months after we've split up, I see that he wasn't the person I thought he was at all. ~ Jane Green

You didn't like him, did you, Dad?"
"It wasn't that I didn't like him," my dad says slowly. "It was just that he lives in a completely different world, and I worried that he didn't really approve of you the way you are, that he was trying to change you into something else."
God, I never realized my dad was that perceptive..
"You see, the thing is," he says after we've both sat for a while in the sunshine, "the thing is that love is really the most important thing. I know it's hard for you to see it now" - he chuckles quietly- "but when I first laid eyes on your mother I thought she was fantastic, and I've never stopped loving her, not for a second. Oh yes, we've had our rough patches, and she can be a bit of an old battle-ax at times, but I still love her. That in-love feeling at the beginning settles down into a different, familiar sort of love, but it has to be there right from the start, otherwise it just won't work. ~ Jane Green

I am beginning to realize, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, that one of the problems I have in life is a tendency to completely romanticize how things will be in the future, which inevitably leads to disappointment because it's pretty much never, never, what I expect ~ Jane Green

Marriage should be about fun. It's about friendship, and laughter, and trust, and fun. ~ Jane Green

I think perhaps we all cook to feed some kind of hunger in ourselves. I am nourished by being surrounded by family and friends, by creating something delicious for them, by nurturing them. ~ Jane Green

She doesn't think, doesn't worry, has no anxiety. She feels no pressure when she is in her garden. She can weed for hours, losing all sense of time until her back starts to hurt and she remembers all the other things she has to do. ~ Jane Green

She had married him because she felt sage, because she'd had enough pain to last her a lifetime, and because although he had many faults, faults she was aware of before she married him, she knew he wouldn't hurt her.
She knew because there was no passion, and the only time she had felt passion, it had come with a price. ~ Jane Green

It's about thinking that being blond & slim & perfect will automatically bring you happiness, & then discovering that life is as full of as many disappointments as there were before. ~ Jane Green

It was everything I had dreamed of, his hands snaking through my hair, my own wrapped around his back, unable to believe I had been given license to touch this boy I had loved for so long, license to hold him, to slip my tongue in his mouth, listen to him sigh with pleasure. ~ Jane Green

Sometimes in life, you have to make things happen. That you can change your life if you're willing to let go of the old and actively look for the new. That even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. ~ Jane Green

That's the thing about theories. You can theorize what you want, but at the end of the day when your theories become reality, when the situation you have theorized about is suddenly presented to you, your theories go flying out the windowز ~ Jane Green

I'm nothing but envious that you've been happily married for two years. Try hauling your cookies on a new blind date every Friday, only to have your, already extremely low, expectations dashed as you meet men who look like Quasimodo and have Homer Simpson's IQ. ~ Jane Green

The fact is that blaming doesn't get you anywhere. It keeps you stuck. Blaming stops you from moving on with your life. ~ Jane Green

You must work to live, not live to work. ~ Jane Green

Forever feels a long time when you're eighteen. When you're away from home for the first time in your life, when you forge instant friendships that are so strong they are destined, surely, to be with you until the bitter end. ~ Jane Green

Marriage is supposed to be this huge great overwhelming passion, and that we're supposed to be looking for our soulmate, our other half, but it's actually pretty damn mundane. After all the excitement goes, what you really want to be left with is someone who is a really good person and who adores you, and who you can grow old with. I know the bastards are exciting, but they don't make a good husband material. ~ Jane Green

By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy. ~ Jane Green

I wish I could be hard and cynical. That I could take things slowly, not give too much of myself, because I'd be so frightened of getting hurt that there wouldn't be any other way. But no. every time I meet someone I dive in headfirst, showering them with love and attention, and hoping that this time they're going to be different. ~ Jane Green

Every time we try and get it together, something happens to pull us apart, and I can't help but feel that this is just isn't meant to be. And God knows I'm happy enough on my own, but tell me, is this how am I supposed to carry on? ~ Jane Green

You see what you want to see,
And you hear what you want to hear.
You dig? ~ Jane Green

She hadn't realised how low her self esteem had been, first during her relationship, when she tried to turn herself into someone else, and then when recovering from the break up.
Because however much she was a part of the decision to break up, she still felt bruised and battered, never thought she'd have the energy to go through all this again with someone new.
It has been so much easier, since they separated, to be cocooned with her family, to nest in her cosy home and allow life to carry on for others, outside the safety of her house. ~ Jane Green

Shock doesn't hit all at once. I have learned. ~ Jane Green

I have a theory that you can tell what the head of a company is like by the people who work there. I knew a publishing house that was run on fear and paranoia, and I felt sorry for everyone who worked there. Needless to say, the person at the helm was not known for kindness, warmth, or grace. ~ Jane Green

Marriage should be about fun," she says gently. "It's about friendship, and laughter, and trust, and fun. If it's not fun, if you take it all too seriously, what's the point? You know I've been with Andy for fifteen years, and the reason it still works is because he's my best friend and he still makes me laugh. Admittedly, not all the time, and often we get completely bogged down in work, and the kids, and life, but he's still the person I most want to phone when anything happens in life, and he's still the person who makes me laugh the most. ~ Jane Green

What I want in a good beach read is sunshine, drama, easy-reading and transportation to another world and other people's problems. ~ Jane Green

Horrible as this is to admit, I think I cried less because my dad was dying than for the dad I had never had. ~ Jane Green

The best things in life always find us when we're not looking for them. ~ Jane Green

As far back as I can remember, I have worshipped the sun. My skin is fair, but as the years have gone by, it has toughened and darkened. I now turn a rich golden brown every summer, but only after the first day of burning. ~ Jane Green

Other people's behavior is non of my business. ~ Jane Green

I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off. ~ Jane Green

The definition of insanity is doing what you've always done and expecting different results. ~ Jane Green

Anyone can live in a house, but homes are created with patience, time and love. ~ Jane Green

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels. ~ Jane Green

Because I'm attractive and sucessful so if I can't get a man I must be failing at something? ~ Jane Green

When I was a student, I had a part time job as a barmaid at a dodgy pub in Kent. ~ Jane Green

But he had already planned. Already planned the holiday. The proposal. Even the ring.............., he loved her, but he wasn't sure that love was enough. ~ Jane Green

That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though. ~ Jane Green

I have spent many a night in an Internet chat room, but not since I've been married. ~ Jane Green

In 'Straight Talking,' I had bared my soul, and the press attention had been overwhelming. There were times when I felt scared and vulnerable, regretting the articles I had written to publicize the book, regretting I had opened my life up for all to see. ~ Jane Green

Good relationships require kindness, commitment, and appreciation. ~ Jane Green

Once the intimacy has gone, however well you may get on, however friendly you may become, it is hard to believe it was ever there. ~ Jane Green

She always says she doesn't believe women should get married before the age of thirty-five ... she says women change so much in their twenties, they can't possibly know who they are, and the choices they make before the age of thirty are rarely good ones. ~ Jane Green

The only best friends she has ever really had, has ever wanted, could ever truly count on, is Elliott. ~ Jane Green

Alcohol made me beautiful in a way I never felt the rest of the time. ~ Jane Green

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously. ~ Jane Green

I have only ever been to Antigua to hop over to other Caribbean islands. The airport had always seemed perfectly lovely, but I'm a quiet sort of holiday girl, and Antigua always seemed big. ~ Jane Green

I am Superwoman. I am the author of 15 novels, including one about cancer. I am not, however, someone who 'gets' cancer. I am a sun worshipper who never thought it could happen to me. ~ Jane Green

But maybe love doesn't have to be about lust, maybe I could learn to love, maybe. ~ Jane Green

Covers, so many covers, so many different, delectable pictures, and although, metaphorically speaking, it is the thing I hate most, when it comes to literature I always judge books by their covers. First the cover will catch my eye, then I read the back of the book, and then finally the first page. ~ Jane Green

My training as a journalist was invaluable: when I worked on 'The Daily Express,' the editor would often ask for 1000 words within a couple of hours. I could not say I was not inspired. I had to get on with it. ~ Jane Green

I have long been fascinated by our inclination to assume others we meet have the same moral code, similar values, and yet we can never be sure. ~ Jane Green

I do know that I have always been one of life's observers, always standing slightly on the outside, watching. ~ Jane Green

That's the problem with lying. You can never remember what you've said. ~ Jane Green

Things have a habit of working out in life the way they are supposed to, if you are able to just relax and trust in the workings of the universe. ~ Jane Green

On the way back to the office- I get a cab, on expenses, naturally- I decide that I could quite like Ed. Maybe I could even fancy him, and maybe the fact that I'm not thinking about him that much when I'm not with him is a good thing, maybe it means this is a proper relationship, not just lust, or the equivalent to a teenage crush. Because quite frankly I'm sick of falling madly in love and spending twenty-four hours a day thinking about them and crying with misery when they don't phone. I'm sick of being the kind of girl who, when they say jump, says how high. I'm sick of always, always being the one to fall in love and get hurt. And maybe this is how it should be, getting on with my life and not putting all my energies into a relationship. ~ Jane Green

I read so much about men who aren't what they seem, and particularly stories written by women who found out their husbands had a slew of secrets they knew nothing about. ~ Jane Green

When it's right, it's right. ~ Jane Green

I am divorced, and one of the things I am tremendously grateful for is that my ex-husband and I made a decision to go through mediation. I knew a trial would drag on for years, would cost me everything, but worse, would be devastating for our four small children. ~ Jane Green

Good. She is planning lunch on the deck today, is on her way into town via her neighbor's house, where she has spent the last hour or so ~ Jane Green

Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways ~ Jane Green

To be honest, I'm not sure about this whole scared of commitment business. I think it's become too handy, a useful phrase that men can bandy about whenever they feel like being assholes. And sure, I do believe there are some men who are genuinely terrified of commitment, but there aren't that many, and for the most part I think it's that they haven't met the right woman yet. Because if a man, no matter how scared he professed to be, met the woman of his dreams, he wouldn't want to let her go, would he? And sure, he might not want to actually get married, but if he were madly in love and risked losing her, he'd do it, wouldn't he?
That's what I think, anyway. ~ Jane Green

I am not a big skier, but I love apres-ski wear and imagine I would look great in an all-white, fur-trimmed ski suit. ~ Jane Green

She rattled around that huge house, growing more and more used to being on her own, resenting his presence more and more when he was back for the weekends, feeling like he was invading her space.
They became like strangers, ships that pass in the night, not able to agree on anything, not having any common ground ~ Jane Green

When we are tired, everything seems so very much worse. ~ Jane Green

I have learned that it is imperative that I make time for my friends, that they demand to be as much a part of the mix as my family and my work, and perhaps more so, because they are not an inevitability. ~ Jane Green

Everyone wants to help," she spat. ~ Jane Green

You discover something so awful, so life-changing, the only way you can cope is to jump straight into denial. ~ Jane Green

I want someone who will adore me so much that they cannot even walk past me without touching me in some way. I want someone who will worship me, even when.. I'm sitting around in fluffy slippers with no makeup on and hair scraped back.
I'm sick and tired of being on my own. Most of the time I'm fine. Some of the time I even quite enjoy it. But at this precise moment in time I'm fed up with it. I've had enough.. ~ Jane Green

I wanted something seismic to happen at the end. I wanted him to wake up so we could somehow forgive each other, say we loved each another, move on with some sense of closure, for I knew this would be the last time I saw him, but he didn't wake up, and nothing was said. ~ Jane Green

She can't explain why she is choked up. She isn't entirely sure, other than the sweetness of Patrick's familiarity, an aching nostalgia for her youth, a reminder of all that is good, and solid, and stable. All that she once had. All that she has lost. Patrick has grown into a big man. Solid. Imposing. His embrace is all-enveloping, tight, stable. Like being held by a bear.
Safe, she thinks.
I am safe.
And almost immediately after: I have come home. ~ Jane Green

You are the best person I've met in years, and if I'd met you in a year's time, or maybe even a few months, I know we could be happy together, but I can't give you what you need. ~ Jane Green

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong! ~ Jane Green

You don't have to wait for someone to treat you bad repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like that, then it sets the pattern for the future. ~ Jane Green

I'm not sure that insecurity is a good enough excuse for that sort of behavior. We're all insecure, and I really think he's old enough to have discovered the reasons behind his insecurity, and do something about them.
... Lucy ~ Jane Green

Other people's behavior is none of my business. ~ Jane Green