Jennifer Haigh > Quotes

“It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“...sooner or later you have to decide what you believe." It was a thing I'd always known but until recently had forgotten: that faith is a decision. In its most basic form, it is a choice.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

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

“The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“I have great respect for writers who are humble, whose language allows the reader to see the story but doesn't get in the way. Language is a window, and if the window is clean, you shouldn't be aware you're looking through glass.”
― Jennifer Haigh

“Show me a man of fifty who doesn’t regret the lives he hasn’t lived.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“I open my heart to her and lay it on the table.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“It wasn’t her problem to solve; it was Kevin’s. Let God fix him. After repeating the words for months, she finally understood what they meant. Let go and let God.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“His words stayed with her for years. Each night as she lay waiting for sleep, she tried to re-create the evening in her mind — the tone of his voice, his hand on her shoulder. Soon the memory was worn as an old photograph, the edges fuzzy from frequent handling; she worried that she’d gotten the words wrong, forgotten some nuance of his face or voice. Finally she wondered if she’d made the whole thing up.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mrs. Kimble

“When they touched it was like touching her own body. From childhood they had been the same height; their arms and legs and hands were still perfectly congruent. Only the centers of them were different, aching, fascinated, every part of them heated to the same temperature as the sun warmed pond.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mrs. Kimble

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

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

“...that renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“Grandma Judy has beautiful old-lady handwriting, the letters all connected and slanting in the same direction. To Grace it is a marvel, a lovely but useless talent like churning butter or riding sidesaddle—”
― Jennifer Haigh, Rabbit Moon: A Novel

“What can a photograph mean? It seems to me, now, that it’s not so much the image itself as the fact that it was kept. In my own bedroom closet are three large boxes I labeled—late one night, in a dark mood—PLUTONIUM. They are filled with my own keepsakes and very heavy, decades of living distilled down to a few potent sentiments: tenderness, longing, regret.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“It was the oldest friends who mattered most. With each passing year, Paulette realized this more deeply. She thought of her borther Roy, retired to Arizona, to golf with other men who were also - she loathed the expression - senior citizens. Roy had arrived in Phoenix with an entire life behind him, a career, a marriage; to his new friends he'd always be old.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“Often enough, one of us will make the other laugh so hard and long that asphyxiation seems a real danger. It’s a heady pleasure rare in adulthood, not unlike—I will say it—the shared breathlessness of rousingly successful coitus.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Faith

“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 gone before you knew it;how foolish she'd been to refuse any of it.”
― Jennifer Haigh, News from Heaven: Acclaimed Short Stories of Family Life and Redemption in a Small Pennsylvania Town

“If you happen to be a woman, all problems are female problems.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“It’s just like Darren to worry about poor people in China while giving no thought to poor people in America, who need Walmart because they can’t afford to shop anywhere else—a losers’ club Rich feels, eternally, on the brink of joining, if he hasn’t already.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“She lay awake and thought of her mother, gone forever. There was no one else she wanted to tell.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“Drug addiction and alcoholism, depression and anxiety, accidental pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. These conditions are believed to share a common etiology, the failure of virtue. Whatever their diagnosis, all Wellways patients have this in common: their troubles are seen to be, in part or in full, their own goddam fault.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“For years, struggling to raise the daughter she’d expected to have, she had failed to see the one she’d gotten.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“Like all young people, she’d once harbored the unconscious conviction that the world had begun the day she was born. Time had disabused her of this notion. It was, she supposed, the fundamental difference between youth and age. She”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“How to prove a woman had been murdered if you couldn’t prove she’d ever lived?”
― Jennifer Haigh, Zenith Man

“Severe cases of Turner’s, where a girl’s second X chromosome was missing entirely, were easy to identify. Small stature plus certain telltale physical features—low-set ears, a low hairline, folds of excess skin at the sides of the neck—could have no other cause.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“Half of sobriety was wishing you’d never started: if you’d never taken that first drink, first bump, you could have stayed clean forever with no sweat at all. Instead, it became your life’s work.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“He talks the way sprinters run and dancers dance, an elite athlete. He talks as though he was born to talk. At”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light