Top 40 Jill Alexander Essbaum Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Even the loveliest shoulders can bear but so much.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

2. “A LONELY WOMAN IS a dangerous woman.” Doktor Messerli spoke with grave sincerity. “A lonely woman is a bored woman. Bored women act on impulse.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

3. “Pain is the proof of life.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

4. “There is a correlation between the severity of a person’s moods and a lack of self-knowledge.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

5. “Where you were is never as relevant as where you are.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

6. “A mistake made once is an oversight. The same mistake made twice? An abberation. A blunder. But a third time?” Doktor Messerli shook her head. “Whatever’s been done has been done to an end. Your will is at work. You beg a result. A repercussion. A precedent has been established. You will get what you want. And there’s no need to seek out these mistakes. For now it is they who seek you.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

7. “Jung said that beautiful women were sources of terror. That as a general rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

8. “Anna’s conclusions were these: That fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact, can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

9. “A cock wants a hole.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

10. “How shall I unwind me from the spool of you?”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

11. “To each her own fear. But I don’t want to watch my life unfold. I want to unfold it myself, if you will. If there’s something I want to do? I do it. If there’s something I want? I chase it. And I Catch it. If I believe in something, I support it. If none of those things? Then... nothing. Then I let it go.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

12. “IS THERE A DIFFERENCE between shame and guilt?” Anna asked. “Shame is psychic extortion,” Doktor Messerli answered. “Shame lies. Shame a woman and she will believe she is fundamentally wrong, organically delinquent. The only confidence she will have will be in her failures. You will never convince her otherwise.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

13. “Bored women join clubs and volunteer. Sad women have affairs.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

14. “A secret’s safest hiding place is in the open.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

15. “Grief that finds no relief in tears makes other organs weep.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

16. “Anna, I only know this: when it is your turn to die – my turn, anyone’s – when it is time for you to let go of one life and reach out for another, you will be left with no choice but to hurl yourself willingly into the mother arms of transfiguration. It’s not an end. It’s a beginning.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

17. “Make no mistake: everything has a variant. Like versions of truth, like versions of love, there are versions of sleep. The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools. Everyone else must pay each night her restless due.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

18. “To the non-Swiss ear it sounds as if the speaker is construing made-up words from the oddest rhythms and the queerest clipped consonants and the most perturbing arrangement of gaping, rangy vowels.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

19. “An obsession is a defense against feeling out of control. A compulsion is the failure of that defense.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

20. “The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

21. “Shames the shadow of love she thought.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

22. “Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

23. “Novelty’s a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

24. “She thought about Switzerland. Where a smile will give you away as an American.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

25. “No one is promised a tomorrow. She had been wrong about every man she loved or said she loved. She’d been wrong about everything. She’d entered into her life in the middle of its story. She had confused herself with the actress who portrayed her.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

26. “Same seeks same; we search out the familiar.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

27. “It’s a travesty when a woman wastes herself.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

28. “Switzerland is undeniably a modern country, but gender roles make occasional appearances. In some cantons women didn’t get the right to vote until the 1970s. Anna knew she’d been in Switzerland too long when this stopped appalling her.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

29. “Truth is told when it tells itself.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

30. “Synchronicity is the external manifestation of an inner reality.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

31. “Shame lies. Shame a woman and she will believe she is fundamentally wrong, organically delinquent. The only confidence she will have will be in her failures. You will never convince her otherwise.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

32. “There’s always a correspondence between one’s dreams and one’s wounds.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

33. “A man can smell a woman’s sadness.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

34. “And if ever there’s a time to move beyond one’s boundaries it’s when one has, literally, moved beyond them.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

35. “The trouble with mistakes is that they rarely seem like mistakes when they are made.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

36. “There are no accidents, Anna. Everything correlates. Everything connects. Every detail bears a consequence. One instant begets the next. And the next. And the next.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

37. “I’ve never been nearly as alone as I always say I am.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

38. “I am beholden to my own peculiar irony: to survive I self-destruct.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

39. “She could go anywhere she wanted. The going wasn’t the problem. The problem was belonging where she went.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

40. “Ghosts,” Doktor Messerli continued, “aren’t always the spirits of the human dead bound to the earth. A ghost can be the residual feeling that follows an act you have accomplished but feel bad about. Or the act itself. Something you’ve been or done that you cannot escape.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

41. “The face one wears as an adult is a mask that’s cut to fit in her youth.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

42. “Is it possible to fall in love over a single look? Anna couldn’t say. But at the behest of a glance tossed casually down upon her, she was made witness, victim, and slave to the culmination of all her mythologies.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

43. “I’m neither plain nor pretty. I’m irrevocably average.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

44. “For... if love is not infinite or eternal? Then I want nothing of it.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

45. “The answer I seek is one I do not truly wish to know:.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

46. “In waiting I learn to live with the anticipations of loss –.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

47. “It doesn’t matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

48. “In the short, sharp span of a single heartbeat, she knew that nothing she’d ever said or done, and nothing she would ever say or do again, would carry even half the tragedy of this.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

49. “Walling herself off circumvented the risk of real closeness between two people and the eventual, unavoidable loss that always accompanies love. Liberating herself from the concern of others served a sinister purpose as well. There were fewer people to whom Anna was accountable. It’s the easiest way to lie and not get caught: make yourself matter to no one.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum