Literary Birthday – 16 August – Jennifer Donnelly

Happy Birthday, Jennifer Donnelly, born on 16 August 1963.

Six quotes from novels

1. Sometimes, when you catch someone unaware at just the right time and in just the right light, you can catch sight of what they will be.
2. Words fail me sometimes. I have read most every word in the Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language, but I still have trouble making them come when I want them to. Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get – a cold sick feeling deep down inside – when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know you will never be the same again.
3. Voice is not just the sound that comes from your throat, but the feelings that come from your words.
4. Life’s all about the revolution, isn’t it? The one inside, I mean. You can’t change history. You can’t change the world. All you can ever change is yourself.
5. There were lives in those books, and deaths. Families and friends and lovers and enemies. Joy and despair, jealousy, envy, madness, and rage. All there. I reached out and touched the cover of one called The Earth. I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.
6. I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.

Jennifer Donnelly Quotes from her website

1. I write in a room in my house in New York’s Hudson Valley. I usually have a pot of strong tea and a bar of dark chocolate for company and courage. I plot and plan and scheme and dream in longhand, but I do the actual writing on my computer.
2. For me, research is more an art than a science.
3. There’s only one thing that makes you a writer – and that’s writing. Writing – any kind of writing: journals, term papers, letters to your grandmother – will hone your ability with words. As you keep writing, you’ll learn how to do more with less. You’ll get a feel for simplicity and elegance, when to let rip and when to hold back, and how the subtle art of suggestion can lend incredible power to a paragraph or scene.
4. Reading is also incredibly important. It shows you how other writers do it, how they succeed and where they fail. Whether it’s a novel, a newspaper article or the copy on the back of a cereal box – it’s all writing.
5. I hate it when people apologise for what they read. Some bestsellers aren’t exactly literary. So what? They’re fun and rip-roaring. Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer to them? Grrrr!
6. So when it gets hard and cold and lonely, and you think it’s all useless and you’re never going to get anywhere, know that there’s only one thing you should do, only one thing you must do, only one thing you can do: Keep writing.

Jennifer Donnelly is an American writer. She grew up in New York State, in Lewis and Westchester counties, and attended the University of Rochester where she majored in English Literature and European History. She is the author of the adult novels The Tea Rose, The Winter Rose, and The Wild Rose, as well as the young adult novels These Shallow Graves, Revolution, and the historical novel A Northern Light, which won Britain’s prestigious Carnegie Medal, the LA Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature, and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book Award. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for Image: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson
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