Top 75 Jennifer McMahon Quotes
#1. Oh my God! Sam said again, his voice shaking. I've given birth to something inhuman, Phoebe thought. A lamprey with row after row of teeth.
Jennifer McMahon
#2. One exercise I always do when I'm getting to know a character is ask her to tell me her secrets. Sit down with a pen and paper, and start with, 'I never told anybody ... ' and go from there, writing in the voice of your character.
Jennifer McMahon
#3. Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.
Jennifer McMahon
#4. Reggie's earliest memory of her mother began with her mother balancing an egg on its end and ended with Reggie losing her left ear.
Jennifer McMahon
#5. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness - I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full-time.
Jennifer McMahon
#7. Reggie smiled. 'You haven't changed at all.' Tara took another pile of clothing from her bag and gave Reggie a sly grin from over the top of it. 'Do any of us really?
Jennifer McMahon
#10. And, as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy.
Jennifer McMahon
#11. Sometimes a butterfly is not just a butterfly. This is what Oma taught me. You know the worst thing I learned from her? You can be a monster and not even know you are one. They look like us. They think they are us. But really, they've got a monster hiding inside.
Jennifer McMahon
#12. In all honesty, I didn't love reading when I was a kid. I'd rather be running around in the woods or doing my best to scare the pants off all the children in the neighborhood by pretending my house was haunted or making them play Bloody Mary in the bathroom.
Jennifer McMahon
#13. Tracer was a good guy, but Ruthie didn't understand how one individual could smoke the amount of pot he did and still function.
Jennifer McMahon
#14. Do me a favor - right now, today, start a list of all your crazy obsessions, the things that get your heart pumping, that wake you up in the middle of the night. Put it above your desk and use it to guide you, to jumpstart your writing each and every day.
Jennifer McMahon
#15. People often ask if my books should be read in any particular order, but they're all standalone novels, so picking up any one of them would be fine.
Jennifer McMahon
#16. She places the orders for cases of frozen meat, huge cans of wax beans. She makes sure they stay
Jennifer McMahon
#17. I absolutely love writing about the things that scare me, the things that keep me up at night. I don't quite know why. Perhaps because so many things do scare me, and this is my subconscious way of trying to exercise some control over things that go bump in the night!
Jennifer McMahon
#18. Call me a skeptic, but I've always thought that it takes more than organic vegetables and talking circles to make an ideal society. Raven
Jennifer McMahon
#19. She swore she was breathing 1971 air - it smelled like dust and cigarettes and long-faded perfume. Like ghosts, if ghosts had a smell.
Jennifer McMahon
#20. They were exactly what the other needed; the missing piece that made everything else magically click into place.
Jennifer McMahon
#21. Honestly, I feel pretty awed anytime I meet just about any writer. I get how hard it is to write and make a living from it, but there's also this almost magical force you need to tap into, and I'm amazed by anyone who can do it.
Jennifer McMahon
#22. And, as in all fairy tales, there was bloodshed, there was loss.
Jennifer McMahon
#23. I graduated with a B.A. from Goddard College in 1991 and then studied poetry for a year in the M.F.A. in Writing Program at Vermont College.
Jennifer McMahon
#24. At the heart of every story is conflict - whether external or internal, make it a good one, and remember that this problem is going to shape your character, leaving her forever changed.
Jennifer McMahon
#25. I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.
Jennifer McMahon
#26. Ain't no point worrying about what's been or what's gonna be. You just gotta do your best right now. And trust everyone else is doing the same.
Jennifer McMahon
#27. You can sink a thing deep, weight it down with stones, but eventually, it will surface.
Jennifer McMahon
#28. You can have the greatest characters in the world and write beautifully, but if nothing's happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly.
Jennifer McMahon
#29. What if things happened to you - special, magic things - because you'd been preparing for them?
Jennifer McMahon
#30. Sometimes I wonder if you remember things the way they really were.
Jennifer McMahon
#31. Q: Bury deep, Pile on stones, Yet I will Dig up the bones. What am I? A: Memories - A FOLK RIDDLE
Jennifer McMahon
#32. My grandmother was a psychiatrist and had shelves full of medical books - I was constantly sneaking looks at some of those. I was fascinated by the descriptions of illnesses and diseases.
Jennifer McMahon
#33. We can't change things by wishing. Only by doing. It's our actions, Tara, not our thoughts.
Jennifer McMahon
#34. I think people see what they want to see ... But think about it: if you'd lost someone you love, wouldn't you give almost anything to have the chance to see them again?
Jennifer McMahon
#35. I practically lived in the woods when I was a kid, avoiding grown-ups and my dysfunctional family, pretending I was half-wolf, a feral child who napped in nests made out of ferns, ate wild blueberries, and wove sticks and feathers into her hair.
Jennifer McMahon
#36. Some people say, 'Write what you know.' My thing is, 'Write what scares you.'
Jennifer McMahon
#37. No one sees the world like you do, Emma. Creating art is about sharing your own personal vision with the world. Taking something no one else can see and bringing it to life.
Jennifer McMahon
#38. Lisa smiled. 'You know how sometimes, you catch the faintest hint of movement in the corner of your eye, then you blink and it's gone? That's them.
Jennifer McMahon
#39. Madness is always a wonderful excuse, don't you think? For doing terrible things to other people.
Jennifer McMahon
#40. Sometimes we're at the mercy of other people. We don't even understand the power they have over us until it's too late.
Jennifer McMahon
#41. For some people, Rose, it's easier to pretend the things that frighten us most don't exist at all.
Jennifer McMahon
#42. I guess you never know what other people are thinking, do you?
Jennifer McMahon
#43. Some things, I think, like fairy books and secret doors, are only meant to be found by children.
Jennifer McMahon
#44. She was his great adventure; his love for her had taken him places he'd never dreamed of going.
Jennifer McMahon
#45. we all do what we think is best. Sometimes we make terrible mistakes, sometimes we do the right thing. Sometimes we never know. We just have to hope
Jennifer McMahon
#47. My mother taught me to believe in ghosts: to use a Ouija board, have seances, and leave little offerings out for those who have passed.
Jennifer McMahon
#48. thoughts and words have power, and if you allow your worst fears to form fully, you run the danger of bringing them to life. As
Jennifer McMahon
#49. She closed her eyes. Said the four most comforting words she knew: "Once upon a time."
An incantation.
Jennifer McMahon
#51. I was born in 1968 and grew up in my grandmother's house in suburban Connecticut, where I was convinced a ghost named Virgil lived in the attic.
Jennifer McMahon
#52. The world was full of dangers now that she was pregnant: mercury in tuna, hot tubs, beer, secondhand smoke, over-the-counter medicine. Not to mention crazy baby-abducting fairy kings.
Jennifer McMahon
#53. Think of me,' she said because it seemed like something a girl in a fairy tale might say. Think of me. Remember me. Love me. Turn me into a story you tell again and again. The sister who was good as gold and became a queen.
Jennifer McMahon
#54. Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.
Jennifer McMahon
#55. And deep down, she felt like maybe she didn't deserve it-that she belonged with the petty thieves and guys who drank Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast
Jennifer McMahon
#58. I found many treasures in the woods over the years: shotgun shells, empty Colt 45 bottles, old railroad spikes, orange and black beetles eating a dead mouse, pebbles that looked just like teeth, old stone walls and cellar holes, a rusted out frying pan, the skull of a cat.
Jennifer McMahon
#59. Some people are made stronger by loss. Others are broken by it.
Jennifer McMahon
#60. I believed then - in a deep, easy way that is impossible for me as an adult - that there was more to this world than meets the eye. Trees had spirits; the wind spoke. If you followed a toad or a raven deep into the heart of the forest, they were sure to lead you to something magical.
Jennifer McMahon
#61. And how that lady Suz was all wrong: art is not all about chaos, about taking things apart. True art, Emma will tell them, is about finding a way to make what's broken whole.
Jennifer McMahon
#62. If snow melts down to water, does it still remember being snow?
Jennifer McMahon
#63. I have a pretty open mind about supernatural stuff - I do believe that there's more to this world than what meets the eye.
Jennifer McMahon
#64. All great heroes have a flaw. It's one of the things that makes them heroes.
Jennifer McMahon
#65. I think of setting as almost a character of its own, influencing the other characters in ways they're not even aware of. So much of the success of a good ghost story rides on creating a creepy atmosphere; details of the landscape itself can help create a sense of dread.
Jennifer McMahon
#66. I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.
Jennifer McMahon
#67. But Tess always wondered - maybe people were better off with the watered-down version of life, life with blinders, filters, cars that ran and buildings that went up on time, simple, stupid, mindless jobs. Maybe they were happy.
Jennifer McMahon
#68. Although in my life the level of loss has never reached the extremes it does in 'The Winter People,' I certainly can identify with being both a daughter longing for her mother and being a mother who is almost scared by the intensity of her love for her daughter.
Jennifer McMahon
#69. I do believe in ghosts, or at least in some kind of persistent spiritual echoes of the past in certain places.
Jennifer McMahon
#70. All my life, I had this idea that if I could unravel the mystery that was my mother, then I could help save her. But it didn't really work. We were close, but she struggled with mental illness and alcoholism, and it was rough at times.
Jennifer McMahon
#71. You never know who you'll meet. The world is about connections, Regina. Not just who you know, but who they know. It's all one big web, everything interconnected, everyone tugging on each other's strings.
Jennifer McMahon
#72. Marriage is full of such cut-and-dry arrangements, Rhonda thought,then felt that small ache she sometimes got at the back of her skull-the one that told her she might be alone forever, not a fate that she chose but rather a fate that seemed to have been chosen for her.
Jennifer McMahon
#73. I think we all have a kind of dark side, and that's what keeps life - and characters - interesting. That's one of the things that I'm drawn to write about again and again, the secrets we keep and how they shape us.
Jennifer McMahon
#75. I've never done a sequel - so far, there have been too many new stories and characters calling my name.
Jennifer McMahon
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