Jill Alexander Essbaum Quotes

#1. I think it's important to let each thing you write teach you how to write it. You must listen to what you do. Let it be in control. I don't step in until I know what it demands of me.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#2. I do believe that dreams are interpretable. Analysis and praxis have taught me so.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#3. A LONELY WOMAN IS a dangerous woman." Doktor Messerli spoke with grave sincerity. "A lonely woman is a bored woman. Bored women act on impulse.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#4. For ... if love is not infinite or eternal? Then I want nothing of it.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#5. It's a travesty when a woman wastes herself.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#6. Even the loveliest shoulders can bear but so much.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#7. A cock wants a hole.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#8. Shames the shadow of love she thought

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#9. A secret's safest hiding place is in the open.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#10. We [people] are made separate by the things we do or do not do. Responsibilities of all types curb us. Desire betrays us. No wound is ever truly petty. And there are so many ways to be locked apart from the rest of the world.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#11. Anna's spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of The Thorn Birds pulled from her mother's bookshelf.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#12. Whores, Anna once read, make the very best wives. They are accustomed to the varying moods of men, they keep their broken hearts to themselves, and easy women always ease through grief.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#13. The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#14. But pain is an impatient customer. It wouldn't be long before it demanded attention.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#15. Anna loved and didn't love sex. Anna needed and didn't need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#16. That it ought to be known I was born this way,
With indiscriminate tendencies.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#17. Sometimes, some of us in some things we do know better. When we know better, I think it's imperative that we do better. Otherwise we're perpetuating myths that have for centuries done us no good. Men and women alike. No one is exempt from being called into consciousness.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#18. She bought a pretzel from a vendor and

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#19. A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#20. Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action - all action, past and future - comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#21. Is it possible to fall in love over a single look? Anna couldn't say. But at the behest of a glance tossed casually down upon her, she was made witness, victim, and slave to the culmination of all her mythologies.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#22. But there are times to talk to the dead, times when the dead want to talk.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#23. Switzerland is undeniably a modern country, but gender roles make occasional appearances. In some cantons women didn't get the right to vote until the 1970s. Anna knew she'd been in Switzerland too long when this stopped appalling her.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#24. I'm suspicious of dreams in books too. Because they're boring and too self-serving.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#25. Synchronicity often masquerades as coincidence. As right-place-right-time-ness. As an and-then-suddenly kind of incident.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#26. Where you were is never as relevant as where you are.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#27. Make no mistake: everything has a variant. Like versions of truth, like versions of love, there are versions of sleep. The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools. Everyone else must pay each night her restless due.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#28. Novelty's a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#29. Bored women join clubs and volunteer. Sad women have affairs.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#30. Anna's conclusions were these: That fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact, can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#31. Bergulme. Elsbeere. Hagebuche. Efeu. Scots elm. Service tree. Hornbeam.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#32. Truth is told when it tells itself.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#33. An obsession is a defense against feeling out of control. A compulsion is the failure of that defense.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#34. She could go anywhere she wanted. The going wasn't the problem. The problem was belonging where she went.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#35. I'm cheating on the man I'm cheating on my husband with, Anna thought. I grow less decent every passing day.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#36. Grief that finds no relief in tears makes other organs weep.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#37. . . . the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#38. Analysis isn't pliers, and truth is not teeth: you can't pull it out by force. A mouth stays closes as long as it wants to. Truth is told when it tells itself.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#39. A man can smell a woman's sadness

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#40. Some weaknesses beg to be seized.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#41. The only thing we need to know is this: they bring home a paycheck.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#42. There is a correlation between the severity of a person's moods and a lack of self-knowledge.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#43. Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#44. Synchronicity is the external manifestation of an inner reality.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#45. Even the ugliest swan is still more beautiful than the loveliest crown on the fence, Anna thought

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#46. I am beholden to my own peculiar irony: to survive I self-destruct.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#47. At the Manor on Bahnhofstrasse Anna fought aggressive crowds to pick out a modest twin sweater set that

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#48. I am the sum of all my twitches.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#49. Pain is the proof of life

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#50. And if ever there's a time to move beyond one's boundaries it's when one has, literally, moved beyond them.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#51. He'd taken the boys to the Hallenstadion many times to see the ZSC Lions play.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#52. Anna returned her gaze to the bankers' wives, who huddled into the company of one another. The women were young. Their husbands wore the jewellery of their beauty like elegant wristwatches.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#53. She thought about Switzerland. Where a smile will give you away as an American.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#54. Let's get you one, Anna."
"A lover?"
Edith rolled her eyes. "No. A fucking houseplant. Yes, a lover." Edith smirked. "It'll cheer you up!

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#55. I'm neither plain nor pretty. I'm irrevocably average.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#56. Same seeks same; we search out the familiar.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#57. There are two basic groups of German verbs ... strong and weak. Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow typical rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don't follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on your own terms ... Like people, ... The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are the same.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#58. No pain ever takes full leave of its person. That pain is greedy and doesn't give ground. That a body remembers what hurts it and how. Old pains get swallowed by new pains. But newer pains always follow suit.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#59. The trouble with mistakes is that they rarely seem like mistakes when they are made.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#60. Jung said that beautiful women were sources of terror. That as a general rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment. Anna

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#61. Then Anna and Archie took the number 10 tram from Sternen Oerlikon,

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#62. And just like that, your big, black lies grow small and white.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#63. Four simple chambers.
A thousand complicated doors.
One of them is yours.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#64. Suggested they try the Glatt, an enormous American-style mall in Wallisellen, one town over from Dietlikon.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#65. I've never been nearly as alone as I always say I am

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#66. There's always a correspondence between one's dreams and one's wounds.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#67. The face one wears as an adult is a mask that's cut to fit in her youth.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#68. I have no knack for volition.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#69. Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell. - JOAN CRAWFORD

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#70. Anna, I only know this: when it is your turn to die - my turn, anyone's - when it is time for you to let go of one life and reach out for another, you will be left with no choice but to hurl yourself willingly into the mother arms of transfiguration. It's not an end. It's a beginning.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#71. There are no accidents, Anna. Everything correlates. Everything connects. Every detail bears a consequence. One instant begets the next. And the next. And the next.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#72. And rose from her stool to make a big, bullying point of walking to the scales and weighing them herself. Anna felt scolded and two feet tall. She carried the agitation all the way home and didn't speak another word of German for the rest of the day.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#73. One day after class, she dropped her purse outside Bahnhof Oerlikon

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#74. Indulged a pair of affable though persistent Zeugen Jehovas who, each month, arrived on her doorstep with a German-language copy of The Watchtower.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#75. No one is promised a tomorrow. She had been wrong about every man she loved or said she loved. She'd been wrong about everything. She'd entered into her life in the middle of its story. She had confused herself with the actress who portrayed her.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#76. This season's promotion was a set of knives. Anna saved the stickers - Merkli - but rarely cashed them in.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#77. To the non-Swiss ear it sounds as if the speaker is construing made-up words from the oddest rhythms and the queerest clipped consonants and the most perturbing arrangement of gaping, rangy vowels.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#78. Ghosts," Doktor Messerli continued, "aren't always the spirits of the human dead bound to the earth. A ghost can be the residual feeling that follows an act you have accomplished but feel bad about. Or the act itself. Something you've been or done that you cannot escape.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#79. A FACE SEEN OUT of context creates confusion.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#80. On another she made chitchat with the cashier at the Coop. That was an absolute first. The checker offered a forced, availing smile in return.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#81. Is that not always the case? Given any two people in a relationship, one will always love more, the other less. Right?

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#82. As fussy as they were about cleanliness and order, the Swiss seemed to Anna to be rather lax about graffiti.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#83. What had she learned about verbs? In the past and future tenses, the verb came at the end. And in the present it followed the subject. Wherever she went it tailed her. She dragged it behind like a sack of stones.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#84. You love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don't feel is apathy.

Jill Alexander Essbaum