Jane Hamilton Quotations

...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.

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

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.

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

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

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

Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated. I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets.

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

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

Is it love that connects us, is that what it is? I never knew that the feeling I have is regular old love because it's so-intricate. Perhaps there is another name for it, one we don't yet know. I used to think that love was simple and noticeable, like rain falling, so that just as you'd look at your skin and say Water, you would also wake in the morning and say Love. But it has been underneath, this new and old thing I feel, subterranean, silent and steady, like blood, rushing along and along without often making itself known.

The magical descriptions of Italy and hilarious observations about love, travel, natives and foreigners in Love in Idleness are but a few of its many pleasures. Amanda Craig has created a hot shimmery climate in which a cast of old friends, quirky family members and naughty children who make love potions come to know themselves and their hearts. A delightful brew.

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.

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.

We're only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds.

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.

It is a rule of nature that taking a day off on the farm sets a person back at least a week.

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

It's all a big old chain. There isn't one unconnected link.

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

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.

After about one hour of rain, the drainage ditch in the front of the house is so full it is halfway up the front yard. The backyard looks like a lake. We are on septic and every time it rains, you cannot use the bathroom facilities, and the smell of septic is very strong.

The big buzz at the Phoenix is about the possible radio station.

It was a gift. They're really community heroes. And they're all musicians and have a love of music and understand what the Phoenix nurtures.

The easiest thing was a Web site. It just seemed the natural thing to do.

The main thing the Phoenix does is have an open-door afternoon program for teens to come and play music and do homework and skate and socialize, a place to be off the streets.

It's an incredible opportunity for the community and an incredible opportunity for young people. There are a lot of things to learn while implementing a radio station.