77 Quotes by 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.

The harvest was a wild living thing that you were trying to tame while all the while it was dragging you behind, arms out, flailing, in the chase. But here was the miracle: Despite the chaos, the lack of planning, the bad feeling between Sherwood and my father, there was also an overriding unity of purpose, a reverence for the family history, a love for the soil within the property lines.

I heard the phrases and I wanted all of me to call out in a song, a song that doesn’t have words, a song that almost doesn’t have noise. A lot of people take a short cut and call that feeling of song love. They just call it that because there isn’t a way to describe it. But the word love doesn’t describe the half of it. It doesn’t do anything to bring to mind the song we all want so desperately to sing.

I spent my entire youth being in love with gay men because they were the most interesting and compassionate people I knew.

There is so much inherent drama in the matter of change. Disappointment in yourself and others, coping with the fact that life is essentially shipwreck, becoming a person you yourself could not imagine yourself to be, for good and for bad, and then ultimately there is the basic matter of loss.

People want to be artists but don't want to do the ground work.

Author tours used to have a sense of excitement and pleasure, a sense of occasion. I remember stores having a table with wine and food. It was just a real evening.

All I hope, selfishly, is that there will be real books until the day I draw my last breath.

We didn't have a TV until I was 12.