Top 30 Jenna Blum Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends.”

— Jenna Blum

2. “Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One’s Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one’s heart lies.”

— Jenna Blum

3. “She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame.”

— Jenna Blum

4. “Reality is subjective, don’t you know that by now? It’s how we experience the world that makes it real to us.”

— Jenna Blum

5. “They call him a wicasa wakan, Charles says. A divine man. A blessed man. Sure, somebody whose soul is eroded more quickly that other people’s especially if he uses his talents to help them. Because he can see things others can’t, and that’s a psychic burden. Still. It’s not stigmatized like it is in our culture. It’s viewed as it should be, with respect.”

— Jenna Blum

6. “The death of a parent, he says to it, is a profoundly lifealtering experience, isn’t it? When I was a child, I often had this feeling of God’s in his Heaven: All’s right with the world – that’s Robert Browning. An English poet. But ever since my father died in the last war, I’ve awakened each morning knowing that I’ll never again feel that absolute security. Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off...”

— Jenna Blum

7. “Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off...”

— Jenna Blum

8. “How could she tell him that we come to love those who save us?”

— Jenna Blum

9. “The Mississippi flows slowly by and the sun shines clean over everything, and Karena knows Tiff thinks she is crying because of Charles, because her brother is stuck in a mental asylum instead of out and about on this beautiful day the way he should be, healthy and alert and comfortable in his own skin.”

— Jenna Blum

10. “Yes, Charles is a genius, and he loves his manias. But Charles’s disorder is the gift nobody wants to be given. There is no cure for it, no solution. Either Charles takes his medications and suffers, or he doesn’t and everyone else does. It is colossally, sickeningly, definitively unfair.”

— Jenna Blum

11. “Time will fold over the past if you let it.”

— Jenna Blum

12. “No,” he said, “I have no sensation there.” That was true, and it was the blessing of scars: the deeper they were, the more you couldn’t feel anything in them at all.”

— Jenna Blum

13. “Kevin was right, Karena thinks, there is grotesquerie here, but it’s not Karena and Charles. It’s Charles’s disorder, the way it reduces a grown man to sobbing panic on the floor. The way it renders Karena unable to feel. The way it takes you by the hand, nodding and smiling slyly, and leads you back to the same old place every time, so just when you think everything might be all right after all, you come home and open a door to a room full of blood.”

— Jenna Blum

14. “Most of us are drawn to this time period thinking it was a war of absolute good versus absolute evil – qualities rarely found in their purest form – and that’s true. But don’t forget that history isn’t just a study in black and white. Human behavior is comprised of ulterior motives, of gray shades.”

— Jenna Blum

15. “Information trumps fear, right?”

— Jenna Blum

16. “We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?”

— Jenna Blum

17. “The past is past. And better it remain so.”

— Jenna Blum

18. “How many times have I heard you Whirlwind guys say that even now, after all these years of research, nobody knows why one supercell spawns a tornado and another doesn’t? Why wouldn’t that be the case for people too? Every brain is different and responds differently to treatment, and what might not help one person, for instance holistic medicine, might help the next.”

— Jenna Blum

19. “It’s like being in a sort of club, isn’t it? A bereavement club. You don’t choose to join it; it’s thrust upon you. And the members whose lives have been changed have more knowledge than those who aren’t in it, but the price of belonging is so terribly high.”

— Jenna Blum

20. “They change my brain. So in essence, what you’re saying I should do is compromise my very self, my understanding and feeling of who I am, to conform to what you want. Is that it?”

— Jenna Blum

21. “There is, of course, no way of knowing for certain. There is no way to know what they felt, those millions who were given no chance at survival. I can only speculate. And even I, a Jew – yes, I am a Jew, Dr. Swenson, and my entire family was murdered by the Nazis – even I can only imagine a pale facsimile of what it must have been like. But I do know that there is no justification. No possible rationalization for what the Nazis did, for what civilian Germans permitted and encouraged to happen.”

— Jenna Blum

22. “Thomas cracks his joints on the steering wheel. It’s all right. I mean, it’s not, but of course you wouldn’t know. It’s not exactly something I advertise. And I only bring it up now to let you know I’m in your corner. Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends. So I understand. That’s all.”

— Jenna Blum

23. “Just that ever since I was very little I’d had this – affliction, or gift, or whatever you want to call it; that I have visions. And that this is something I accept about myself as part of who I am, a scary part sometimes, but also the best part of me because it makes me who I am, you know? It helps me understand things.”

— Jenna Blum

24. “But I’m going to prove there’s a link between storms that rapid-cycle and ones that produce tornadoes because I’m a rapid cycler myself.”

— Jenna Blum

25. “Each person has this choice to make about how to live with the past, this dignity, this inviolable right.”

— Jenna Blum

26. “However, the knowledge that her misery has company is little comfort, and this jubilant springtime display is not to be trusted. Life is a frosted cake made of worms.”

— Jenna Blum

27. “How warm the day can be when the wind is at your back.”

— Jenna Blum

28. “Severe weather is just Nature’s way of correcting an imbalance.”

— Jenna Blum

29. “The amount of all the pretending she’ll have to do exhausts her.”

— Jenna Blum

30. “Anna imagines that, were she able to visit the caves in which people first dwelled, she would find scrawled drawings that have been omitted from museums and history books. There would be scenes of ritual aggression and submission, painted in blood, caked with dried seminal fluid. They are the very antithesis of fresh, the rites between men and women; age-old and rotten to the core.”

— Jenna Blum

31. “Een van de vreemde dingen aan de dood, heeft Trudy ontdekt, is namelijk dat je in het kielzog ervan gewoon verdergaat alsof er niets gebeurd is. Het lijkt harteloos en verkeerd, maar nu de rituelen van de rouw afgehandeld zijn, hoeft Trudy alleen nog maar de enorme omvang van deze plotselinge verandering proberen te bevatten.”

— Jenna Blum

32. “For one of the odd things about death, Trudy has discovered, is that in its wake one must go about business as usual; it seems heartless and wrong, but now that the rituals of mourning have been attended to, the sole task left to Trudy is to try and comprehend the enormity of thes sudden change.”

— Jenna Blum

33. “Died from eating a Hershey bar.”

— Jenna Blum