Mary Jane Quotes

“... I hadn't understood that people you loved could do things you didn't love. And, still, you could keep loving them.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“In the Cone family, there was no such thing as containment. Feelings were splattered around the household with the intensity of a spraying fire house. I was terrified of what I might witness or hear tonight. But along with that terror, my fondness for the Cones only grew. To feel something was to feel alive. And to feel alive was starting to feel like love.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Part of being alive is figuring out the balance between what you want, what you need, and what you have with what you don't want, don't need and don't have.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“And I also wanted to tell her how much I loved cooking for the Cones. How cooking for people you love feels less like a chore and more like a way of saying I love you.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Fear, I suddenly realized, was an emotion that ran through my home with the constant, buzzing current of a plugged-in appliance.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“It had never before occurred to me that sometimes dishes weren’t just dishes, that things could represent ideas in more powerful ways than the ideas themselves.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“To feel something was to feel alive. And to feel alive was starting to feel like love.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“I think we did it right those couple of months, don't you? Great food, great music, and great fun. Don't ever let anyone tell you that fun isn't important because, damn, Mary Jane, if there's one thing I've learned in my strange life, it's that fun counts.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Feelings were splattered around the household with the intensity of a spraying fire hose.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“But foolish moments like this seemed worth the thrill and unexpected intimacy of being in on things with the adults.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Well, we're all addicts of some sort...part of being alive is figuring out the balance between what you want, what you need, and what you have with what you don't want, don't need, and don't have”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“What had happened last night seemed so horrible. But after that cry, and then the laugh, I felt ridiculously happy.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Maybe a person’s standing in the community was an illusion. Like the witch in the Cone house. An imagined evil that created unnecessary rules.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“We'd learned about the Holocaust in school, just like we'd learned about the civil rights movement. What we'd never learned was that sometimes the people who kept those ideas alive were the people you lived with.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Well, we’re all addicts of some sort,” Sheba said. “Part of being alive is figuring out the balance between what you want, what you need, and what you have with what you don’t want, don’t need, and don’t have.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“I was in the middle of the moment, the picture had been taken less than an hour ago, and already I felt the loss of time, the loss of this summer, the loss of this makeshift family. I supposed it was preemptive nostalgia, inoculating me for what was to come.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“What in the past had seemed normal suddenly felt abnormally hushed, quiet, and contained. It was like we were in a play that went on forever and ever without any dramatic tension.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“No one on this Earth would pay five cents to see my talents if I didn't look the way I do.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Something was going to unravel and I felt like I was the person who was holding the loose string, about to pull and watch it all fall apart.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“The Cones seemed anti-fancy, with Izzy standing on the dining room table, peeing on the beach, and coloring penises in her anatomy coloring book.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Was he doing his addict?” “Yes. He was doing his addict.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“But being a doctor makes up for being a Jew.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“I hadn’t understood that people you loved could do things you didn’t love. And, still, you could keep loving them.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“That I now understood that cleanliness and order were nice, but giving love, feeling love, and showing love trumped housework? That”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“It had never before occurred to me that sometimes dishes weren't just dishes, that things could represent ideas in more powerful ways than the ideas themselves.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Great food, great music, and great fun. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that fun isn’t important because, damn, Mary Jane, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my strange life, it’s that fun counts.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Until I met Jimmy, I hadn’t understood that people you loved could do things you didn’t love. And, still, you could keep loving them.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Cart-riding was forbidden by my mother, who thought it was the childhood equivalent of racing a motorcycle without a helmet.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“What we’d never learned was that sometimes ideas of racism and anti-Semitism were sparked to life by the very people you lived with.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“Of his Grandmother, Jimmy had said, she was a warty old hag who loved Marlboros and bourbon almost as much as she loved Jesus.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane