Literary Birthday – 13 July – Jane Hamilton

Jane Hamilton Quotes

1. It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can.
2. I’ve found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.
3. All I hope, selfishly, is that there will be real books until the day I draw my last breath.
4. We’re only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you’re born, sometimes grows if you aren’t in lucky surroundings. It’s our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us, choking and gasping for breath in the mud.
5. People want to be artists but don’t want to do the groundwork.
6. There were so many miracles at work: that a blossom might become a peach, that a bee could make honey in its thorax, that rain might someday fall.
7. As a species, we would not have survived without humour.
8. In the larger world, tribalism is an enormous problem, as it ever has been: both strength and idiocy borne from belonging.
9. Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated. I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets.
10. She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.

Jane Hamilton is an American novelist. She has published eight novels: The Book of Ruth, A Map of the World, The Short History of a Prince, Disobedience, When Madeline was Young, Laura Rider’s Masterpiece, The Excellent Lombards, and most recently, The Phoebe Variations. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, was published in 1988 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Book Award in 1989. It was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 1996, and it was the basis for a 2004 television film of the same title. Her non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Allure, the Oprah Magazine, Elle, and various anthologies. Through the years she’s taught writing at Carleton College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.

Image source: Larry D. Moore, Licensed under CC BY 4.0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jane_hamilton_2007.jpg#filelinks

by Amanda Patterson
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