Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.

If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.

Talk between women friends is always therapy.

If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.

Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

When the year turns, there are bells on the wind. All the old years fall on the ground in lights.

The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.

Love is the outlaw's duty.

I wish I had more time to write.

As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.

Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.