Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

18 quotes in 271 categories

• Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.
• The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.
• Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.
• Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death,…
• The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.
• Talk between women friends is always therapy...
• If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.
• Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.
• If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is…
• When the year turns, there are bells on the wind. All the old years fall on the ground in lights.
• That whole business of having two homes, and that divided loyalty bind that kids get into. I mean, my parents were divorced - though I…
• Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.
• I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.
• I see my work as a continuum, moving from book to book.
• I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very…
• I wish I had more time to write.
• I think we really forget how connected we are to the past.
• Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.

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