Jennifer Haigh

“I open my heart to her and lay it on the table.”

— Jennifer Haigh

“His explanation takes two minutes exactly. The shale lies a mile underground, has lain there since before there was a Pennsylvania, before…

— Jennifer Haigh

“Destiny, she’d learned, was written in the heavens; a person couldn’t take what the universe didn’t wish to give.”

— Jennifer Haigh

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

— Jennifer Haigh

“Stomach issues aren’t typical. But let me do some research.” Trexler scribbles on a notepad. “What about breathing problems? That’s usually what…

— Jennifer Haigh

“But his singing was unconscious and irrepressible - an expression of his native exuberance, the dreamy, buoyant soundtrack running through his head.”

— Jennifer Haigh

“When they touched it was like touching her own body. From childhood they had been the same height; their arms and legs…

— Jennifer Haigh

The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art…

— Jennifer Haigh

“More than anything in life, she wishes she'd let him. That she'd smiled for the camera. That she'd said yes. Life was…

— Jennifer Haigh

“He looks out over his back yard, what’s left of it. With the forest gone, the property looks smaller than sixty acres,…

— Jennifer Haigh

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

— Jennifer Haigh

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .

— Jennifer Haigh

“But once you start taking money out of my pocket, I got to say something.” He spits deliberately. “Your land sets right…

— Jennifer Haigh

That renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy…

— Jennifer Haigh

“They say the eyes are the first thing to go”—he glances meaningfully at the reading glasses—“but I say it’s curiosity. People hit…

— Jennifer Haigh

“Her skin was as pale as milk. She must live on vanilla ice cream, Dinah thought; rounds of Camembert, crème anglaise.”

— Jennifer Haigh

“...sooner or later you have to decide what you believe." It was a thing I'd always known but until recently had forgotten:…

— Jennifer Haigh

“His words stayed with her for years. Each night as she lay waiting for sleep, she tried to re-create the evening in…

— Jennifer Haigh

“It’s just like Darren to worry about poor people in China while giving no thought to poor people in America, who need…

— Jennifer Haigh

“Sewage treatment plants use disinfectants to kill bacteria.”

— Jennifer Haigh

“He has never joined the coffee-drinking masses at his neighborhood Starbucks, who assemble daily in order to ignore each other completely—humans of…

— Jennifer Haigh

“….. The air smelled of sweet ocean, a special thing. As a little girl she’d identified a half dozen ways the sea…

— Jennifer Haigh

It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection,…

— Jennifer Haigh

“It was the oldest friends who mattered most. With each passing year, Paulette realized this more deeply. She thought of her borther…

— Jennifer Haigh

“I have great respect for writers who are humble, whose language allows the reader to see the story but doesn't get in…

— Jennifer Haigh