Quotes from Jim Crace

The dead leaves fly. They're cropped and gathered to the rich barn of the earth.

And it seems I ought to scatter too. Perhaps at once. It's always better to turn your back on the gale than press your face against it.

A hundred years ago no one was silent or tongue-tied, as we are now, when death was in the room. They had not yet muzzled grief or banished it from daily life. Death was cultivated, watered like a plant. There was no need for whispering or mime.

I think I'd like her to turn round. I want to see her face a second time. That first time she was hardly visible. She was little more than dark on dark, a body shape, as I remember it. If only she would spin round on her heels and the moonlight would oblige, I could persuade myself she's real and not a spectre summoned up by loneliness.

I am excused, I think, for wondering if I am the only one alive this afternoon with no other living soul who wants to cling to me, no other soul who'll let me dampen her. The day has ended and the light has snuffed. I'm left to trudge into the final evening with nobody to loop their soaking hands through mine.

On nights like this, when there is anxiety about, there is a glut of lovemaking. Then the moon is our dance master. He has us move in unison. He has us trill and carol in each other's ears until the stars themselves have swollen and ripened to our cries. As ever here, we find our consolations sowing seed.

It was their creed that devils had no place on earth, that evil was not a living creature in the world. There was no one to blame other than oneself.

Yet there still was love, the placid love that only time can cultivate, a love preserved by habit and by memory. Their tree had little rising sap, perhaps, but it was held firm by deep and ancient roots.

We only meet the God within our true selves through suffering. We seek the wilderness because in this solitude we can hear ourselves more clearly.

It's certain that you cannot tell from how a person works or how a person strolls behind her hens what kind of life they live in secrecy.

Sometimes in matters of the heart words are not required. Are ill advised, in fact.

We are a heathen company, more devoted to the customs and the Holy days than to the Holiness itself. We find more pleasure in the song and dance of God than in the piety.

The plowing's done. The seed is spread. The weather is reminding me that, rain or shine, the earth abides, the land endures, the soil will persevere forever and a day. Its smell is pungent and high-seasoned. This is happiness.

Death does not tidy up or sweep as it departs. We all of us leave traces other than the ashes and the bones.

There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

Wheat—like men and women—benefits from being crushed. Crushing makes it fit to stand up all the better.

Passion is the work of seconds. You only have to make a god of what you most desire.

for how could anyone not know by now how mischievous the world could be?

If I talk about my father's funeral, as I did when I was promoting the last novel, 'Being Dead,' I'm not going to tell any lies, but there are certain things I'm not going to tell you, and I'm certainly not going to tell my grief.

I've never finished anything by Dickens.

The celebrity sense of writers is something which is very tempting... But the enthusiasm comes from the fact that it's such a natural activity, storytelling.

Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.

As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.

I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.