Jill Alexander Essbaum Quotes

• “...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

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• “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

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• “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

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

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “An obsession is a defense against feeling out of control. A compulsion is the failure of that defense.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “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

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• “grief. The first is anticipatory. This is hospice grief. Prognostic grief. This is the grief that comes when you drive your dog to the vet for the very last time. This is the death row inmate’s family’s grief. See that pain in the distance? It’s on its way. This is the grief that it is somewhat possible to prepare for. You finish all business. You come to terms. Goodbyes are said and said again. Anguish stalks the chambers of your heart and you steel yourself for the impending presence of an everlasting absence. This grief is an instrument of torture. It squeezes and pulls and presses down. Grief that follows an immediate loss comes on like a stab wound. This is the second kind of grief. It is a cutting pain and it is always a surprise. You never see it coming. It is a grief that can’t be”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “There’s always a correspondence between one’s dreams and one’s wounds.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “Truth is told when it tells itself.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “IS THERE A DIFFERENCE between shame and guilt?” Anna asked. “Shame is psychic extortion,” Doktor Messerli answered. “Shame lies. Shame a woman and she will believe she is fundamentally wrong, organically delinquent. The only confidence she will have will be in her failures. You will never convince her otherwise.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “She could go anywhere she wanted. The going wasn’t the problem. The problem was belonging where she went.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “Pain is the proof of life”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “That it ought to be known I was born this way,
  With indiscriminate tendencies.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “bandaged. The wound is mortal and yet you do not die. That is its own impossible agony. But grief is not simple sadness. Sadness is a feeling that wants nothing more than to be sat with, held, and heard. Grief is a journey. It must be moved through. With a rucksack full of rocks, you hike through a black, pathless forest, brambles about your legs and wolf packs at your heels. The grief that never moves is called complicated grief. It doesn’t subside, you do not accept it, and it never—it never—goes to sleep. This is possessive grief. This is delusional grief. This is hysterical grief. Run if you will, this grief is faster. This is the grief that will chase you and beat you. This is the grief that will eat you.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “Four simple chambers.
  A thousand complicated doors.
  
  One of them is yours.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “Bored women join clubs and volunteer. Sad women have affairs.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “To each her own fear. But I don't want to watch my life unfold. I want to unfold it myself, if you will. If there's something I want to do? I do it. If there's something I want? I chase it. And I Catch it. If I believe in something, I support it. If none of those things? Then ... nothing. Then I let it go.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “The trouble with mistakes is that they rarely seem like mistakes when they are made.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “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

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• “I’m neither plain nor pretty. I’m irrevocably average.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “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

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• “Novelty’s a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “Same seeks same; we search out the familiar.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “Shame lies. Shame a woman and she will believe she is fundamentally wrong, organically delinquent. The only confidence she will have will be in her failures. You will never convince her otherwise.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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• “The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

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