Jane Hamilton Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

There were so many miracles at work: that a blossom might become a peach, that a bee could make honey in its thorax, that rain might someday fall. I thought then about the seasons changing, and in the gray of night I could almost will myself to see the azure sky, the gold of the maple leaves, the crimson of the ripe apples, the hoarfrost on the grass.

Jane Hamilton
It is a rule of nature that taking a day off on a farm sets a person back at least a week.

Jane Hamilton
Our mission in life is not to discover our fate as we go along, or even to procreate, but rather to fill up the endless gray void that is time.

Jane Hamilton
She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.

Jane Hamilton
Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated. I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets.

Jane Hamilton
You have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help... And then finally, the way through grief is grieving.

Jane Hamilton
This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer.

Jane Hamilton
I had forgotten what it was like, to be drawn to a person.... I'd forgotten how your blood flows toward a person when they move, so that all at once you know what the pull of gravity feels like. and you know that this is something strong and important, something that you need for life, this woman moving through the room.

Jane Hamilton
Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

Jane Hamilton
It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.

Jane Hamilton
I spent whole afternoons in the dirt, making my patch of grown flawless. I even cleared the worms away, before I found out that all the tunnels they make give air, and probably other molecules I don't know about yet, to the plants.

Jane Hamilton
It was about forgiving. I understood that forgiveness itself was strong, durable — like strands of a web weaving around us, holding us.

Jane Hamilton
From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

Jane Hamilton
In Charles Dickens's books I had to admire the way the meanest enemies spoke to each other, with what seemed to me to be the greatest civility.

Jane Hamilton
In the end maybe what marriage offered was the determination of one's burial site.

Jane Hamilton
We are part of each other's lives in much the same way a lover is only slightly beneath closed lids in sleep.

Jane Hamilton
It was impossible not to admire him, not to want to do something to contain that kind of beauty- drink him, ingest him, sneak into his shirt and hide for the rest of one's natural life.

Jane Hamilton
I have since wondered if a person can know how deep a thing goes without getting outside of it, without taking it apart, without, in fact, ruining it.

Jane Hamilton
It's all a big old chain. There isn't one unconnected link.

Jane Hamilton
I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

Jane Hamilton
Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.

Jane Hamilton