Top 90 Jessie Burton Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “I’d been scared of other people’s power my whole life, never mind my own.”

— Jessie Burton

52. “A summer’s day will make so many sounds, when you yourself remain completely silent.”

— Jessie Burton

53. “Doubt now riots against certainty –.”

— Jessie Burton

54. “As your life unfurls, what makes you sure your reasons are the right ones? You don’t ever know for sure. You’re simply trying to survive.”

— Jessie Burton

55. “The bars on our cage are of our own making.”

— Jessie Burton

56. “I was in possession of my own story. I was the one who could either keep it or discard it.”

— Jessie Burton

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “We studied men like him at school – protected gentlemen, rich gentlemen, white gentlemen, who picked up pens and wrote the world for the rest of us to read.”

— Jessie Burton

61. “How do I begin to love you? – the.”

— Jessie Burton

62. “My brother knows the danger of having nothing to do.”

— Jessie Burton

63. “She never married,′ Pellicorne says. ‘A waste.’ For some of us, Nella thinks, it’s a waste to be married.”

— Jessie Burton

64. “GOD – the importance of invisible over tangible.”

— Jessie Burton

65. “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

66. “When beauty is assigned you as a girl, it somehow becomes the essence of your being. It takes over everything else you might be. When you’re a boy, it never dominates who you can be.”

— Jessie Burton

67. “The more people who take part in a ritual, the more justified it seems.”

— Jessie Burton

68. “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

69. “Stvari se mogu promijeniti.”

— Jessie Burton

70. “Never mind being born with a silver spoon in his mouth; try a golden shovel. It was one thing we did not have in common. I grew up in happy obscurity under the moon, but Perseus had been drenched by the strongest beam of sun.”

— Jessie Burton

71. “You can do more with rumour than you can with fact.”

— Jessie Burton

72. “Souls and purses, she thinks, these two are obsessed with souls and purses.”

— Jessie Burton

73. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

75. “When you’re a girl, people think your beauty is their possession.”

— Jessie Burton

76. “This city is like no other city in the world. It is brilliant but it is bloated, and I’ve never called it home.”

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

78. “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

79. “But the words she chooses withhold their best qualities, they refuse to match the way she feels inside.”

— Jessie Burton

80. “People like Lawrie – who never wrote a single line of prose, as far as I knew -seemed to want those who did to walk around with a pad and pencil hanging round their neck, jotting down the whole thing, turning it into a book for their own pleasure.”

— Jessie Burton

81. “A life without regrets is a life unlived.”

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

83. “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

84. “This island is haunted, but by something far more powerful than a witch: my story, my exile, the reason I am here. It was I who echoed in these rocks and pathways, inside the roofs of these caves. It was my memories that acted as signposts to draw Perseus in my direction, but what might happen when he reached his final destination?”

— Jessie Burton

85. “She had told me that the approval of other people should never be my goal.”

— Jessie Burton

86. “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

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

— Jessie Burton

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

— Jessie Burton

89. “Love had been a ghost for so long.”

— Jessie Burton

90. “I heard their wings opening, their bodies rising – bodies which they loved as much as I hated mine. I envied them that confidence with such ferocity that my snakes turned to red-hot pokers spanning my skull. I was trapped; I was the one person I could never escape.”

— Jessie Burton