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.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite

“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

“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

“Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite