Jayne Anne Phillips > Quotes

“Talk between women friends is always therapy...”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“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.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“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, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“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.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite

“Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite

“If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“ConaLee, there is no forever. We are on our walk and the day is fine.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“Despite membership in the guild of outcasts, writers do, by quirk of fate or sex or addiction or parenthood, become intimate with others, with those who don’t originate from the planet of words and language. Other things do happen, but we don’t know what they are until we write about them, or think about them in words, or remember them in phrases.
- From "Why She Writes”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“I love you the way I love nightmare, secrets coming up like smoke through a grid, the way I love mirrors shattered but still whole, reflecting the foolish image in a hundred lit-up fragments. No one else could take me, pay my way with what your skin knows.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets: Stories

“A blank pulsing thud of heartbeat is the only key he possesses, and it fits no lock.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“That we are still and stars are turning.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“The ragged cat drags its belly across where the grass is short and the stones are sharp, under the lilacs that have no flowers. The flower smell is gone and the white falls off the trees. Seeds, Lark says, little seeds with parachutes to fly them, Termite, all in your hair, and she runs her fingers through his hair, saying how long and how pretty. He wants the grass long and strong, sounding whispers when it moves, but the mower cuts it. The mower cuts and cuts like a yowling knife. He hears the mower cutting and smells the grass pouring out all over the ground, the green stain so sharp and wet it spills and spills. The mower cuts everything away and Nick Tucci follows the mower, cutting and cutting while the orange cat growls low to move its soft parts across the chipped sharp stones. Deep under the lilacs where no one sees, the orange cat waits for the roar to stop.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite

“A song moves a story fast or slow like the river moves the water.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite

“read my thoughts better than I could think them. But I pulled close the pounding heart of the rabbit on the lawn, and the sound of the owl beating his great wings, flying to find the rabbit and tear it open.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“for the whole town is here, first in alarm and now in curiosity and speculation.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“in the last days perilous times shall come.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“Story dismisses chance or destiny but believes in the still, small voice that draws one forward incrementally.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“So many died birthing babies, the risk taken willingly or forced upon them.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“ConaLee, there is no forever. We are on our walk and the day is fine. You must think…each day is separate, until a way is clear.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“Reasons for Admission 1864 to 1889 Intemperance & Business Trouble Kicked in the Head by a Horse Hereditary Predisposition Ill Treatment by Husband Imaginary Female Trouble Hysteria Immoral Life Imprisonment Jealousy and Religion Laziness Marriage of Son Masturbation & Syphilis Masturbation for 30 Years Medicine to Prevent Conception Menstrual Deranged Mental Excitement Novel Reading Nymphomania Opium Habit Over Action Of The Mind”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“hold”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“Our lives are small, our victories smaller.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“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.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite

“and the slapping feet of the men that follow the box. They have no faces and they feel with the whiskers of dogs.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets: Stories

“Gene Autry riding into coral skyline while the cacti stand up ancient and timeless”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets: Stories

“Miss Janet, not her surname, I think, may never remember who she was, but perhaps she can accept who she is.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch

“The afternoon has closed down, gone purple, coaxed and sucked dark by the storm.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite

“Sheet music circles on the water, silent, open pages, weighted and wet. I train the beam of the flashlight over the words. “Meet Me in St. Louis” drifts by, and “My Funny Valentine.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite

“There’s always been a wild quiet about Solly. It stays in the air near him like a scent.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite