Top 80 Jessie Burton Quotes (2025 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. “For what am I, she wonders, but a product of my own imagination?”

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

9. “From little seeds great flowers grow.”

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

15. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

50. “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