Top 80 Jessie Burton Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I’m a half-finished map and I’m always trying to plot my points, and I won’t have anyone do it for me.”

— Jessie Burton

2. “You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed. My darling.”

— Jessie Burton

3. “I was lonely and I was angry, and rage and loneliness can end up tasting the same.”

— Jessie Burton

4. “You see, remembering’s a blessing and a curse. You can’t erase your bad memories, but a life without regrets is a life unlived. What you remember and how you remember: it makes you who you are. Maybe you have a choice about that, maybe you don’t.”

— Jessie Burton

5. “The Medusa. What did he mean, the Medusa? My name was Medusa, and I was a girl. Perseus had made me sound like a mythical beast. I didn’t want to be a myth. I wanted to be me.”

— Jessie Burton

6. “The turnip cannot thrive in the tulips patch of soil.”

— Jessie Burton

7. “From little seeds great flowers grow.”

— Jessie Burton

8. “Freedom is a glorious thing. Free yourself, Marin. The bars on your cage are of your own making.”

— Jessie Burton

9. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to explain yourself, to tell your story clearly.”

— Jessie Burton

10. “Marin believes love is better in the chase than caught,’ she says. He raises his eyebrows. ‘That does not surprise me. It is not better. But it is easier. One’s imagination is always more generous. And yet, the chase always tires you out in the end.”

— Jessie Burton

11. “Any person’s behaviour would mutate under such constant scrutiny, such bigoted piety – neighbours watching neighbours, twisting ropes to bind us all.”

— Jessie Burton

12. “In suffering we find our truest selves.”

— Jessie Burton

13. “Here she is a puppet, a vessel for others to pour their speech. And it is not a man she has married, but a world.”

— Jessie Burton

14. “She was a woman who’d done nothing wrong except exist.” “Except exist,” I echoed in a whisper.”

— Jessie Burton

15. “Then where is home, Johannes?” He looks at the maps on his wall. “I don’t know,” He says. “Where comfort is. And that is hard to find.”

— Jessie Burton

16. “I’d prefer to rise in love, she thinks – lifting up to the clouds, not plunging to the earth. She pictures herself, weightless and adored, delirious in ecstasy.”

— Jessie Burton

17. “You’re not walking around with a golden halo beaming out of you depending on the power of your paragraph. You don’t come into it, once someone else is reading. It stands apart from you. Don’t let your ability drag you down, don’t hang it round your neck like an albatross.”

— Jessie Burton

18. “Writing is a leap of faith. But how wonderful that the person you’re putting faith in is yourself.”

— Jessie Burton

19. “For what am I, she wonders, but a product of my own imagination?”

— Jessie Burton

20. “I’m not a genius. I just work hard.”

— Jessie Burton

21. “Words are water in this city. One drop of rumour could drown us.”

— Jessie Burton

22. “The conceit of love was better than the mess it left behind.”

— Jessie Burton

23. “The surface of Amsterdam thrives on these mutual acts of surveillance, the neighborly smothering of a person’s spirit.”

— Jessie Burton

24. “Above their rooftops Nature is doing her best to keep up, and the clouds in colors of saffron and apricot echo the spoils of the glorious republic. Nella.”

— Jessie Burton

25. “Every woman is the architect of her own fortune.”

— Jessie Burton

26. “Nothing here is more fabulous than the truth.”

— Jessie Burton

27. “I would have preferred not to have to choose between writing and loving; because for me, they were often the same thing. It was a time of new experiences, without the benefit of the old to mitigate the after-effects.”

— Jessie Burton

28. “Madame says love is best a phantom than reality, better in the chase than caught.”

— Jessie Burton

29. “You are a stone, thrown upon a lake. But the ripples you create will never make you still.”

— Jessie Burton

30. “Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was – and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.”

— Jessie Burton

31. “She has always thought that kindness was an active thing. But the not doing of something, an act of restraint – could that be kindness too?”

— Jessie Burton

32. “You have to keep your wealth afloat and no one will do it for you. It’ll run through your fingers if you don’t care.”

— Jessie Burton

33. “The pastor looks at the money. It is money coming from the wife of a sodomite. It is money coming from a woman. It is the deep-lying root of evil. But it is a lot of money.”

— Jessie Burton

34. “I feel younger than eighteen but burdened as a eighty-year-old.”

— Jessie Burton

35. “Growing older does not seem to make you more certain, Nella thinks. It simply presents you with more reasons for doubt.”

— Jessie Burton

36. “Not all of us receive the ends that we deserve. Many moments that change a life’s course – a conversation with a stranger on a ship, for example – are pure luck. And yet no one writes you a letter, or chooses you as their confessor, without good reason. This is what she taught me: you have to be ready in order to be lucky. You have to put your pieces into play.”

— Jessie Burton

37. “I’m doing the absolute opposite of giving myself away. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll be completely visible. If the painting sells, I’ll be in Paris, hanging on a wall. If anything, I’m being selfish. It’s perfect; all the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss.”

— Jessie Burton

38. “I felt nothing change in the room, except the shock of my voice alone and the peculiar euphoria one feels in the wake of applause, feeling at once cheapened and triumphant.”

— Jessie Burton

39. “Then the birds flew away, their names turned to kisses, a silence to spell a new world.”

— Jessie Burton

40. “A myth finds a way to remember itself. It makes a new shape, rising out of a shallow grave in glory.”

— Jessie Burton

41. “Amsterdam: Where the pendulum swings from God to a guilder.”

— Jessie Burton

42. “Hard grind got us the glory, the saying goes – but sloth will slide us back into the sea. And these days, the rising waters feel so near.”

— Jessie Burton

43. “My writing became the axis upon which all my identity and happiness hinged. It was now outward-looking, a self-conscious performance. I was asked to repeat the pleasure for people, again and again, until the facsimile of my act became the act itself. Cynth’s.”

— Jessie Burton

44. “She had never had a friend like this, in her private room, combing her hair, listening to her, talking about silly nonsense and the uselessness of one’s parents; how the future was perfect, because they hadn’t lived it yet.”

— Jessie Burton

45. “Stvari se mogu promijeniti.”

— Jessie Burton

46. “When you have truly come to know a person, Nella – when you see beneath the sweeter gestures, the smiles – when you see the rage and the pitiful fear which each of us hide – then forgiveness is everything. We are all in desperate need of it.”

— Jessie Burton

47. “They knew now that the dark was simply the beginning of new things. The dark was necessary.”

— Jessie Burton

48. “Sometimes, not even folding yourself into the smallest, littlest shape is enough. So you might as well stay the size you’re supposed to be.”

— Jessie Burton

49. “The rules of this house are written in water. I must either sink or swim.”

— Jessie Burton

50. “Spain’s past is a cut of meat turning green on the butcher’s slab. When the war ended, people were forbidden to look back and see the circling flies. Soon they found themselves unable to turn their heads, discovering that there was no language permitted for their pain. But the paintings at least, remain: Gernica, the works of Dali and Miro...”

— Jessie Burton