Jessica Andrews > Quotes

“I would like to have something to believe in, but it is difficult. Everything my generation was promised got blown away like clouds of smoke curling from the ends of cigarettes in the mouths of politicians and bankers. It is hard not to be cynical and critical of everything, and yet perhaps there is an opening, too. When the present begins to fracture, there is room for the future to be written.”
― Jessica Andrews, Saltwater

“I want it and I do not want it. I want to be visible and I want to be invisible, or perhaps I want to be visible to some people and not to others. It seems unfair that I can't choose.”
― Jessica Andrews, Saltwater

“Books offered me a gauzy version of reality and I stepped hungrily into it. I inhabited an in-between space of terraced streets and bridges laced with lines from novels and iconic film stills. Art layered another world over my real, perceived one and gave me a calm, quiet feeling inside.”
― Jessica Andrews

“I had a special English teacher who let me believe that my ideas were important. She introduced me to writers who wound their words around my wrists and refused to let me slip through the net.”
― Jessica Andrews

“...their tasteful apartments crammed with kitsch cushions and salvaged furniture, art posters in pastel frames.”
― Jessica Andrews, Milk Teeth

“We learned the language of self-destruction, in hip bones and heroin chic. The women we admired could do anything if they were skinny and beautiful enough.”
― Jessica Andrews

“I look at the cliffs and the sea and the sky. 'Don't you ever feel guilty?' I ask him. 'I mean, it's beautiful here. Don't you ever feel bad for wanting something more?'
He skips a step. 'It isn't something more,' he says, decidedly. 'Just something else.”
― Jessica Andrews

“I don’t want him but I want to be wanted, to feel shiny and powerful, less permeable, someone solid.”
― Jessica Andrews

“I wish I knew how to ask for the things I want instead of just swallowing them down, knotted with fear and shame”
― Jessica Andrews

“At first, I thought that reluctance to relinquish the past was a refusal to acknowledge the passing of time. Now I understand it more as a symbol of temporality and a reminder that there are layers of lived experience criss-crossing the surfaces of our lives, invisible to us. There is room for everything here. There are traces of the past in the present and there is space for the future, too.”
― Jessica Andrews

“I know about weight and what it's like to feel your past pressing down on you, to drag it through the days. I know about space; how to hide and shrink from it. I know about reinventing yourself and I know about running away.”
― Jessica Andrews

“I feel an affinity with the Shard, even though it is a symbol of the wealth and status I am so far removed from. It was just an idea when I first arrived there and it grew up in the city at the same rate I did. I like that I can remember a time when it did not exist. It is proof that time is moving forward, especially during those days when I am sliding backwards.”
― Jessica Andrews

“High-rise tower blocks and the despondency of stale, squat houses are aesthetically pleasing when you are removed from them. Middle-class architects with utopian ideals might be able to appreciate the solidity and the magnitude of a huge hunk of concrete with lives carved unapologetically into it, but when that becomes your reality and you have no choice and no way out, when you're living every day under the shadow of someone else's vision, it becomes oppressive, the weight of their dreams crushing the life out of you.”
― Jessica Andrews, Saltwater

“We watched Victoria Beckham shrink into her seat at the World Cup and traced the curves of Kate Moss's thighs in her gold lurex Glastonbury minidress. We swelled with longing as sequins dripped from the narrow shoulders of the Olsen twins and signed with envy as the inky daisies tattooed around Peaches Geldof's stomach squeezed her into a smaller, more angular shape. We watched Alexa Chung form a long black line in her skinny jeans and ogled Cassie from Skins, angel-haired in a green-gold dress, spun out on pills in the dawn.”
― jessica andrews

“That I’m just playing at living here. Like, I go to a café or a pub or something, but it doesn’t feel real.”
― Jessica Andrews

“I didn’t want a particular job or a house or a car, anything that could be easily quantified. I wanted abstractions; a cut-glass sea with light leaking into it, burnt summer tarmac on a motorway at night. I wanted sensation, to go out in the world and let it rip through me, to learn the shape of my coastline, to see if I had any edges. I didn’t know what to do with all that want as it swelled in me like a river, rushing and churning, soaking everything in its path.”
― Jessica Andrews