Quotes from Jane Hamilton

There were moments, I could now see, when it was understandable to completely go off your rocker. The easiest and most reasonable and maybe proper thing to do in the world, to lose hold of yourself.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I needed my own territory, and I didn't know how I was going to get it. And so I took my frustrations and plugged them into someone entirely different from me. I wanted to see if I could slip into someone else's skin.

Author tours used to have a sense of excitement and pleasure, a sense of occasion. I remember stores having a table with wine and food. It was just a real evening.

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

Our mission in life is not to discover our fate as we go along, or even to procreate, but rather to fill up the endless gray void that is time.

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

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

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

'Never change' is the thing that probably high school students have written in each other's yearbooks for time immemorial. They think that command is possible!

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.

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

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 is so much inherent drama in the matter of change. Disappointment in yourself and others, coping with the fact that life is essentially shipwreck, becoming a person you yourself could not imagine yourself to be, for good and for bad, and then ultimately there is the basic matter of loss.

In the end maybe what marriage offered was the determination of one's burial site.

the other's self, that enormous hulking thing each possessed, that a self of course is not inconsequential. p124

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

I love when I'm outside, feeling the sun on my skin. The grass, and the cats on the porch, and myself, all thirsting after the warmth, and finding it, make me know that there's something mighty about our planet and the whole works out there in the universe.

I didn't know if the forgiveness itself was light, glittery stuff that showered down and absolved a person and set them free, or if, instead, it was heavy, cumbersome, a new debt, a currency that was continuously renewed no matter how much was paid out.

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.