Quotes from Jane Johnson

There are days when I think there really is some huge great tapestry of a plan out there and we're all woven into it - this fabulous, complex pattern of life and death, full of recurring motifs and waves of color, and we're each one tiny thread in the weave.

Fear has trapped me, rendered me immobile and powerless. I'd forgotten I even had wings, let alone how to use them.

My throat feels hard and swollen, as if bulky words are trying to choke me.

There is a savagery in all of us

But the best things in life never come easy—

Embroidery is an improbable hobby for someone as disordered as me, but it's the very precision of it that attracts me, the illusion of control it offers. When engaged in stitching a new pattern, I can't think about anything else. Guilt, misery, longing all flee away, leaving just the beautiful little microcosm of the world in my hands, the flash of the needle, the rainbow colors of the thread, the calming exactitude of the discipline.

I have learnt to spin words like dervishes, to bewitch and blur reality.

Why are men ever at war? For power and greed and to enforce their own views on others.

superstitions of a long Cornish ancestry, had touched wood (but only without legs, for fear your luck would walk away from you)

None of us were perfect, and life made us infinitely less so. Tears

long and prosper

an Arabic word – algebra? It comes from the Arabic al-jabr and it means the reunion of broken parts. I like that, 'the reunion of broken parts': it's poetic, don't you think?

Ho?emo li mi, kada jednom umremo, postati zvijezde - te malene nakupine svjetlosnog praha na nemilosrdnom polju crnila? Ili samo odlazimo pod zemlju i tamo trunemo?

discovered in herself a still, quiet center she had never suspected to exist.

They had joked together as young men that they planned to die before their wives; it was the best way, since neither man could imagine life without them.

But now they would believe Hamid was responsible for the death of Mamie. It suited the stories they told themselves about the dark-skinned man, the foreigner, the outsider, the Muslim.

Ah, Constantinople, I would so love to visit Constantinople, to see its domes and minarets, to walk inside the Sancta Sophia and breathe the ancient air of Byzantium—

Under his shock of grey hair their father's face looked as if it had been carved out of wood by a man who had not yet mastered the tools for delicate work.

And that the hand of fate has sleight and craft to match that of any magician.

and thought of the painting of the little boat ploughing a course through dark seas towards the line of light. It had seemed to me then to represent elemental forces over which we had no control; now I see it as a brave little vessel buoyed up by beliefs and hopes, crewed by comrades and lovers, propelled by courage in the face of apparently overwhelming odds.

Kintsukuroi is the name for this ancient Japanese art, which teaches that broken objects are not something to hide away but should be displayed with pride, for they are stronger and more beautiful for surviving the breakage. I think I, too, am stronger and more beautiful for surviving

Anna's cottage was lime-washed and had shutters of a pretty, faded blue.

Dig your well for yourself, and also for the people who will follow along after you.

All these thoughts moved through her head like moths around a fire, sometimes vanishing into the darkness, sometimes catching light and zigzagging crazily about.