Jenna Blum > Jenna's Quotes

“Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”
― Barack Obama

“I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seemed filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster”
― Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
― Lewis Carroll

“Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends.”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“How could she tell him that we come to love those who save us?”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies. ”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off...”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame.”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“From this vantage point in the summer, the countryside below is a dreaming checkerboard over which it seems that one could, with a running start, spread one's arms and fly.”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“The past is past. And better it remain so.”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“For one of the odd things about death, Trudy has discovered, is that in its wake one must go about business as usual; it seems heartless and wrong, but now that the rituals of mourning have been attended to, the sole task left to Trudy is to try and comprehend the enormity of thes sudden change.”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“Een van de vreemde dingen aan de dood, heeft Trudy ontdekt, is namelijk dat je in het kielzog ervan gewoon verdergaat alsof er niets gebeurd is. Het lijkt harteloos en verkeerd, maar nu de rituelen van de rouw afgehandeld zijn, hoeft Trudy alleen nog maar de enorme omvang van deze plotselinge verandering proberen te bevatten.”
― Jenna Blum, Het familieportret

“Thomas cracks his joints on the steering wheel. It’s all right. I mean, it’s not, but of course you wouldn’t know. It’s not exactly something I advertise. And I only bring it up now to let you know I’m in your corner. Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends. So I understand. That’s all.”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“MAY IN MINNEAPOLIS IS LILAC TIME. AS IF TO COMPENSATE for the punitive winter, the city explodes with flowers overnight—making it, if only for a week or two, one of the most beautiful places on earth. First there are sunny starbursts of forsythia; then the cherry and dogwood trees burst into life, showering petals everywhere, pink and cream, drifting thick as snow on the sidewalks. But it is the lilacs that truly herald the coming of spring: lavender and white and blue and sometimes a purple deep as grapes, they bloom in the alleys and over backyard fences and in graveyards. Beauty is everywhere, including the most unexpected places. There is no respite from it.”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“How warm the day can be when the wind is at your back.”
― Jenna Blum, The Stormchasers

“Severe weather is just Nature's way of correcting an imbalance.”
― Jenna Blum, The Stormchasers

“But I'm going to prove there's a link between storms that rapid-cycle and ones that produce tornadoes because I'm a rapid cycler myself.”
― Jenna Blum, The Stormchasers

“The amount of all the pretending she'll have to do exhausts her.”
― Jenna Blum, The Stormchasers

“Most of us are drawn to this time period thinking it was a war of absolute good versus absolute evil—qualities rarely found in their purest form—and that’s true. But don’t forget that history isn’t just a study in black and white. Human behavior is comprised of ulterior motives, of gray shades.”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“A bereavement club. You don’t choose to join it; it’s thrust upon you. And the members whose lives have been changed have more knowledge than those who aren’t in it, but the price of belonging is so terribly high.”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us