Jane Hamilton

“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'm really glad I had those years working on the orchard alongside my husband.”

“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.”

“We didn't have a TV until I was 12.”

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

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

“People want to be artists but don't want to do the ground work.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.”

“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.”

“In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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