Jayne Anne Phillips famous quotes

03-25-2025

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.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Believe #Writing #Practice
Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Towns #Hometown #Grows
As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Sight #Silence #Listening
Love is the outlaw's duty.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Love Is #Outlaw #Duty
When the year turns, there are bells on the wind. All the old years fall on the ground in lights.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Fall #Light #Years
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.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Country #Memories #Distance
Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Men #Trying #Body
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.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Wind #Silence #Vibrations
Talk between women friends is always therapy...
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Therapy
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.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Loyalty #Firsts #Morality
The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#Writing #Secret #Life Is
Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.
-- Jayne Anne Phillips

#War #Moving #Air

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