Top 80 Jessie Burton Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

5. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

8. “Everything man sees he takes for a toy. ‘Thus is he always, forever a boy.”

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

10. “From little seeds great flowers grow.”

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

16. “I’d never known a change that wasn’t monstrous.”

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

19. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

21. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Do you have a body if there is no one there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn’t. I was just a mind floating around the rooms.”

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

27. “If you really want to see your work to completion, you have to desire it more than you’d believe. You have to fight it, fight yourself. It’s not easy.”

— Jessie Burton

28. “But words are water in Amsterdam, they flood your ears and set the rot, and the church’s east corner is crowded.”

— Jessie Burton

29. “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

30. “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

31. “You really are an artist, aren’t you? You think it’s all about you, and you never stop looking for pain.”

— Jessie Burton

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

— 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. “Marin believes love is better in the chase than caught.”

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

36. “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

37. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

40. “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

41. “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

42. “And it would take all my energy ‘changing things’ as you put it, with none left over to paint – which is the whole bloody point of everything. The energy a man might use on – oh, I don’t know, making good work – you want me to use on ‘changing things’. You don’t understand, because you’ve lived your life as an individual, Isaac. And yet everything you do as a man is universal. So enjoy the glory, enjoy the money, and do it for me, because I certainly wouldn’t have been allowed.”

— Jessie Burton

43. “But how right is it to kill a man for something that is in his soul? If Marin is right, and it cannot be removed, then what is the point of all that pain?”

— Jessie Burton

44. “But how right is it to kill a man for something that is in his soul?”

— Jessie Burton

45. “I thought I deserved them, the sort of people you found only in novels. Quick.”

— Jessie Burton

46. “This is not a conversation, it is Agnes sending out darts and watching them pierce.”

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

49. “Although any collective answer to my question remains to be seen, personally I feel quite certain of it. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: in the end, a piece of art only succeeds when its creator – to paraphrase Olive Schloss – possesses the belief that brings it into being. Odelle.”

— Jessie Burton

50. “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