Quotes from Jane Hamilton

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

My god has always been a laissez-faire deity, giving you the initial goods and sending you on to make your way.

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

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

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.

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

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

We all need people to tell us that we were the ones who had been deeply wronged.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I'd forgotten how your blood flows toward a person when they move, so that all at once, you know what the pull of gravity feels like. And you know that this is something strong and important, something that you need for life, this woman moving through the room.

I heard the phrases and I wanted all of me to call out in a song, a song that doesn't have words, a song that almost doesn't have noise. A lot of people take a short cut and call that feeling of song love. They just call it that because there isn't a way to describe it. But the word love doesn't describe the half of it. It doesn't do anything to bring to mind the song we all want so desperately to sing.

It was about forgiving. I understood that forgiveness itself was strong, durable—like strands of a web weaving around us, holding us.

I had forgotten what it was like, to be drawn to a person...I'd forgotten how your blood flows toward a person when they move, so that all at once you know what the pull of gravity feels like. and you know that this is something strong and important, something that you need for life, this woman moving through the room.

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

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.

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 given up on speech with the Rev; there is no use explaining that 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. My trust, even down in that dark place I carry, is that some person will come running. And then finally the way through grief is grieving.

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

The harvest was a wild living thing that you were trying to tame while all the while it was dragging you behind, arms out, flailing, in the chase. But here was the miracle: Despite the chaos, the lack of planning, the bad feeling between Sherwood and my father, there was also an overriding unity of purpose, a reverence for the family history, a love for the soil within the property lines.

Emma, Emma, Emma," I said, wishing I could somehow teach her to take the smaller blows of life in her stride.