John Jakes > Quotes

“I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.”
― John Jakes, Homeland

“Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.”
― John Jakes

“The pain comes from more than the facts of circumstance, or the deeds of others. It comes from within. From understanding what we lost. It comes from knowing how foolish we were - vain, arrogant children - when we thought ourselves happy. It comes from knowing how fragile and doomed the old ways were, just when we thought them and ourselves, secure!. The pain comes from knowing we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again. ”
― John Jakes, Heaven and Hell

“We are all dying of life.”
― John Jakes, North and South

“Take a stand and make a mark.”
― John Jakes

“Losing innocence. Remembering Heaven. That was the essence of Hell”
― John Jakes, Heaven and Hell

“I don't know if there is any place on this earth that I belong.”
― John Jakes, Heaven and Hell

“That was an explanation, not an excuse.”
― John Jakes, Love and War

“Human beings may be inconsistent, but human nature is true to itself”
― john jakes

“It is too late. I love him. I know it may bring me grief, and I can't do a thing about it. Mr. Congreve was right about love being a frailty of the mind.”
― John Jakes, Heaven and Hell

“There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.”
― John Jakes, North and South

“Why did people ignore the lessons of history and their own senses, deny a law of life immutable as the seasons, and erect twisted barriers against it in their minds? He didn't know why, but they did. They wept for the goodness of half-imaginary yesterdays, yesterdays beyond altering, instead of anticipating and helping to shape the good of possible tomorrows. They found things to blame for the flow of events they wanted to stop and could not. They blamed God, their wives, government, books, fanciful combinations of unnamed men--sometimes even voices in their own heads. They lived tortured and unhappy lives, trying to dam Niagara with a teacup.”
― John Jakes, Love and War

“Perhaps—the insight came suddenly—perhaps love existed in its truest, deepest form when one partner saw into the soul of the other and never shrank from what was discovered there.”
― John Jakes, North and South

“This country’s drifting into serious trouble because of the clamor for simple and immediate solutions to complex problems that will take years to solve—even with total effort on both sides.”
― John Jakes, North and South

“And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
― John Jakes, Love and War

“He could never be anything more than what he was: the inheritor of weakness and unbridled emotion, a creature possessed by the past, and carrying its curse forever into the future--”
― John Jakes, The Seekers

“The best that could be left behind by any man: children who had been brought up to behave responsibly and to believe in something beyond their own self gratification. (The Americans”
― John Jakes, The Americans

“—and I say you still haven't answered my question, Father Bleu."
"Haven't I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of—"
"No, no, no!" Her voice was as high as a harpy's. "Don't go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?"
She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. "Madame, I'm not positive I follow."
"Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?"
"I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in—"
"Oh, come off it!" Madame Kagle shrilled. "People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can't begin to foresee or understand?"
"What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?"
"The pain." She glared. "The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we're afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying—the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unless we experience it."
She slurped champagne in the silence. She eyed him defiantly.
"Well, Father? What have you got to say?"
Discreetly Father Bleu coughed into his closed fist. "Theologically, Madame, I find the attempt to separate the mystical act of dying into neat little compartments rather a matter of hairsplitting. And furthermore—"
"If that's how you feel," she interrupted, "you're just not thinking it out."
"My good woman!" said Father Bleu gently.
"Pay attention to me!" Madame Wanda Kagle glared furiously. "I say you pay attention! Because you have never stopped to think about it, have you? If death resembles going to sleep, why, that's an idea your mind can get hold of, isn't it? You may be afraid of it, yes. Afraid of the end of everything. But at least you can get hold of some notion of something of what it's like. Sleep. But can you get hold of anything of what it must feel like to experience the most agonizing of deaths? Your head popping open like that bootboy's tonight, say? A thousand worms of pain inside every part of you for a second long as eternity? Can you grasp that? No, you can't, Father Bleu. And that's what death is at it's worst—the unknown, the possibly harrowing pain ahead."
She clamped her lips together smugly. She held out her champagne glass for a refill. A woman in furs clapped a hand over her fashionably green lips and rushed from the group. Though puzzled, Joy was still all eyes and ears.
"Even your blessed St. Paul bears me out, Father."
The priest glanced up, startled. "What?"
"The first letter to the Corinthians, if I remember. The grave has a victory, all right. But it's death that has the sting."
In the pause the furnace door behind her eyes opened wide, and hell shone out.
"I know what I'm talking about, Father. I've been there."
Slowly she closed her fingers, crushing the champagne glass in her hand. Weeping, blood drooling from her palm down her frail veined arms, she had to be carried out.
The party broke up at once.”
― John Jakes, Orbit 3

“They had thought him such a 'good' man. They should have learned it was dangerous to trust appearances or take strangers at their word in this shit-hole world.”
― John Jakes, Heaven and Hell

“The race is to the driven, not the swift.”
― John Jakes, North and South

“Guilty she might be. But what human being was not? There were things in her past she needn't be ashamed of, things to be proud of; she wouldn't surrender so meekly to a condemning judgment.”
― John Jakes, The Furies

“Neither of you ever let fear put chains on your conscience.”
― John Jakes, Heaven and Hell

“Remember, men. it is better to wound than to slay, since it takes time to carry an injured man to the rear and sometimes requires two of the enemy rather than one.”
― John Jakes, Love and War

“Reading’s the means by which the lowest man can lift himself from a state of ignorance.”
― John Jakes, The Bastard

“Yet how strong was friendship? Could it banish disagreement over a fundamental issue of human liberty—as if the issue and the disagreement didn’t exist?”
― John Jakes, The North and South Trilogy: North and South / Love and War / Heaven and Hell

“1891-1892 Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of exiles. 1883 The New Colossus by EMMA LAZARUS, written to raise funds to complete the Statue of Liberty”
― John Jakes, Homeland

“We was at Sharpsburg. Charlie still is.”
― John Jakes, Love and War

“He and Marie wandered through a square”
― John Jakes, The Bastard

“He thought of nothing but the ardent, open warmth of this singular and passionate young woman who inspired him to love with all of his body and mind.”
― John Jakes, Heaven and Hell

“War was never glorious, never grand—except in the pronouncements pols and other noncombatants made about it. It was, as he had experienced it, mostly dirty, disorderly, boring, lonely, and, for brief intervals, terrifying.”
― John Jakes, Love and War