“This body is yours. No one can ever take it from you, if only you will accept yourself, claim it again--your arms, your spine, your ribs, the small of your back. It's all yours. All this bounty, all this beauty, all this strength and grace is yours. This garden is yours. Take it back. Take it back.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“i never knew how much we consumed. it seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. it's no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. it's no wonder the economy collapsed, if eva and i use so much merely to stay alive.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“It’s a physical urge, stronger than thirst or sex. Halfway back on the left side of my head there is a spot that longs for the jolt of a bullet, that yearns for that fire, that final empty rip. I want to be let out of this cavern, to open myself up to the ease of not-living. I am tired of sorrow and struggle and worry. I am tired of my sad sister. I want to turn out the last light.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Still, there's a lucidity that sometimes comes in that moment when you find yourself looking at the world through your tears, as if those tears served as a lens to clarify what it is you're looking at.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“So my sister dances and the dead house burns, and I scrawl these few last words by the light of its burning. I know I should toss this story, too, on those flames. But I am still too much a storyteller -or at least a storykeeper-still too much my father's daughter to burn these pages.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“We heard the United States had a new president, that she was arranging for a loan from the Commonwealth to bail us out. We heard the White House was burning and the National Guard was fighting the Secret Service in the streets of DC. We heard there was no water left in Los Angeles, that hordes of people were trying to walk north through the drought-ridden Central Valley. We heard that the county to the east of us still had electricity and that the Third World was rallying to send us support. And then we heard that China and Russia were at war and the US had been forgotten.
Although the Fundamentalists' predictions of Armageddon grew more intense, and everyone else complained with increasing bitterness about everything from the last of chewing gum to the closure of Redwood General Hospital, still, among most people there was an odd sense of buoyancy, a sort of surreptitious relief, the same feeling Eva and I used to have every few years when the river that flows through Redwood flooded, washing out roads and closing businesses for a day or two. We knew a flood was inconvenient and destructive At the same time we couldn't help but feel a peculiar sort of delight that something beyond us was large enough to destroy the inexorability of our routines.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“I never knew how much we consumed. It seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. It’s no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. It’s no wonder the economy collapsed, if Eva and I use so much merely to stay alive.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Instinct is older than paper, wilder than words.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Maybe it’s true that the people who live through the times that become history’s pivotal points are those least likely to understand them. I wonder if Abraham Lincoln himself could have answered the inevitable test questions about the causes of the Civil War.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“I get so scared, I can’t stop it. It’s like black waves, and I’m a little cork. I bob to the surface and think I’ll do okay, and then another wave comes and I’m drowning again.” I”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Maybe it's true that the people who live through the times that become history's pivotal points are those least likely to understand them. I wonder if Abraham Lincoln himself could have answered the inevitable test questions about the causes of th Civil War.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Despite her way with fire, Eva always makes me think of water. She's slender and sparkling as the stream beyond our clearing, and like that stream she seems content to live a part of her life underground, seems sure - even now - that she is headed somewhere.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“It came to me then that I could take comfort in knowing my father and my mother were dead, that death's mystery had already embraced them. They had gone on ahead, had broken the trail, and because of that, death seemed a little cozier, a little safer, a little less terrifying. Because my parents were already there - in death - I saw I could afford to enjoy the sunlight for as long as I possibly could. Sitting beside my father's grave, I was glad - and proud - to be alive.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“The walls inside were charred from some ancient fire, blackened and lichened and weathered hard, smelling faintly of a smoke so old there may be no one still alive who could possibly remember the flame.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“I have to admit that this notebook, with its wilderness of blank pages, seems almost more threat than gift—for what can I write here that it will not hurt to remember? You”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Maybe it’s true that the people who live through the times that become history’s pivotal points are those least likely to understand them.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“But whether I touch him or I run, whether I’m dreaming or I’m awake, on his birthday or on all other days, my whole life has been contaminated with the fact that he is dead.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
Jean Hegland
Born place: in Pullman, Washington, The United States
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“Chris: For me! Where do you live, where have you come from? For me!-- I was dying every day and you were killing my boys and you did it for me? What the hell do you think I was thinking of, the Goddamn business? Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that , the world-- the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don't you have a country? Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you? You're not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?”
― Arthur Miller, quote from All My Sons
“Hope offered, then denied. A particular cruelty.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Trick of the Light
“I don't want to worry
I don't want to be sad
I have so much to be happy about”
― Lisa Schroeder, quote from Far from You
“Even South Koreans themselves struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, education-crazed culture.”
― Blaine Harden, quote from Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
“There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the veil that separates mortals and immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear their breathings and feel the pulsations of the heart of the infinite. JAMES A. GARFIELD”
― Candice Millard, quote from Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
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14,000 Things to Be...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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