Marie Jakober > Quotes

“We fashion our destinies with our own hands, by deed or by default, one decade, one year, one hour at a time.”
― Marie Jakober, Only Call Us Faithful: A Novel of the Union Underground

“There is a history that really happened, but none of us will ever know exactly what it was. The other one, the one we think we know, is made by us, and we remake it every time we look at it.”
― Marie Jakober, Only Call Us Faithful: A Novel of the Union Underground

“So we're going ghosting. Our stories lie everywhere, just like our bones, more wild rides than you ever dreamt of, all the daring you want, and all the beauty. Freedom wasn't dull and plodding; it flamed across that Victorian sky like a rocket, it sang in the wind, it made a whole generation into world-changers. And we're going to tell it, if we have to howl in through your keyholes and the cracks in your walls; if we have to haunt your children, and steal across your borders to whisper legends in the ears of strangers.”
― Marie Jakober, Only Call Us Faithful: A Novel of the Union Underground

“I figure a man's character is like his coat, Flinn. Nobody knows if it's any damn good or not, until he's been a few days out in the rain.”
― Marie Jakober, Only Call Us Faithful: A Novel of the Union Underground

“The South was a special place, a chosen people, the best of all possible worlds.”
― Marie Jakober, Only Call Us Faithful: A Novel of the Union Underground

“All of my work is, in one way or another, about power. Who has it and why? Who doesn't have it and why? What happens to people and societies when power relationships become seriously unequal? How are power structures and power relationships created, how are they maintained, how are they changed? What ideas and myths form their foundations? What are the connections between power and religion? Power and sexuality? Power and ethics? Power and the use of violence?”
― Marie Jakober

“I loved the landscape, the heat, the unhurried days, the fragrant and languorous nights. But there was something else, too; a sense of belonging that went beyond birth, that held me to a past beyond my own, to an identity I could no more discard than I could discard my own skin. I was a Southerner, all the way through to the bone.”
― Marie Jakober, Only Call Us Faithful: A Novel of the Union Underground

“We dared the impossible, did the undoable, bore the unbearable, not merely once but over and over again. I don't believe in fate or inevitable destinies, as I keep telling folks. But I do believe in a certain kind of inevitability. When you plant a potato, you get a potato. When you plant a rose, you get a rose. There is a pattern already in the seed, and it will unfold according to its nature.”
― Marie Jakober, Only Call Us Faithful: A Novel of the Union Underground

“Learn to listen, worldling, and to look.” Listen to the rain and the snap of fire, to the whispering of leaves, to the whispering of blood. Not as ordinary sounds — all men do that — but as the voices of another kind of being. Listen until you can hear the chanting in the shimmer of a star….”
― Marie Jakober, The Black Chalice

“I look at my brother monks; I see how contented they are, how confident and saintly, and I am almost reassured. Almost, but not quite… because I know they think the same of me. Brother Paul, they say, how good he is, how pure, how admirable in his virtue. Brother Paul, they say, is a saint. Perhaps, in the secret places of their souls, they endure the same emptiness, the same uncertainty, the same tormenting questions.”
― Marie Jakober, The Black Chalice