Jane Green Quotes & Sayings

But he had already planned. Already planned the holiday. The proposal. Even the ring.............., he loved her, but he wasn't sure that love was enough. — Jane Green

Jules says there are three things that make you a grown-up: an eight-piece set of matching dishes; gin, vodka and whiskey in the house; and making your bed every morning. I disagree with her. I think you're officially a grown-up when you've got another half. When you don't have to live in fear of other couples. When you don't have to feel you're not good enough. — Jane Green

Everyone in that garden knew it was only a matter of time before he kissed her. — Jane Green

I always thought I'd be the quintessential Earth Mother, but when I had Harrison, I really wasn't the natural mother that I always thought I would be. I adore children, but I was never that interested in newborn babies. — Jane Green

Chick lit was amazing, and I was thrilled to be part of it. — Jane Green

I am not someone who's very good at looking after herself, and I am also not someone who goes on holiday very often. — Jane Green

I love the English language, playing with words, watching sentences fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, — Jane Green

I think perhaps we all cook to feed some kind of hunger in ourselves. I am nourished by being surrounded by family and friends, by creating something delicious for them, by nurturing them. — Jane Green

I am now, at twenty-seven years old, bright, funny, warm, caring and kind. But of course people don't see that when they look at Jemima Jones. They simply see fat. — Jane Green

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels. — Jane Green

For the first time in her life she found herself failing at something. — Jane Green

But maybe love doesn't have to be about lust, maybe I could learn to love, maybe. — Jane Green

Good relationships require kindness, commitment, and appreciation. — Jane Green

I read so much about men who aren't what they seem, and particularly stories written by women who found out their husbands had a slew of secrets they knew nothing about. — Jane Green

Happens every time. She gets up to go to the bathroom, leaving her bag behind to focus very intently on walking in a straight line. She's not drunk, she tells herself, but finally starting to relax. The worry of losing her job to the dreadful Louise is starting to recede, and life is looking rosy again, despite no plan and no viable ideas. In the bathroom mirror she — Jane Green

For me, decorating perfection means eclectic styles and collections of beautiful things like pottery, pillboxes and match strikers. — Jane Green

You were so talented," her mother says, smiling. "It is such a pity you didn't pursue that. Don't marry someone because you think you need a partner. And don't marry someone who tries to mold you into what he wants his wife to be. You're better than that. Marry, if you do at all, only someone who loves you just the way you are. Because you are precious. There. I've said my piece. Are you still talking to me?" Meredith — Jane Green

The key to happiness is not getting what you want but wanting what you get — Jane Green

Bad things always happen in three. — Jane Green

Life, Steffi has learned, carries on around the pain, making room for it, absorbing it until it becomes part of the daily fabric, wrapping itself around you and lodging itself in your heart. — Jane Green

The bike crunches along the gravel path, weaving around the potholes that could present danger to someone who didn't know the road like the back of their hand. — Jane Green

Sometimes I think it's me. I think I must be doing something wrong, giving out subliminal messages so they can smell the desperation, read the neon lights on my forehead ... "KEEP AWAY FROM THIS WOMAN, SHE IS LOOKING FOR COMMITMENT," but most of the time I think it's them. Bastards. All of them. — Jane Green

To be honest, I'm not sure about this whole scared of commitment business. I think it's become too handy, a useful phrase that men can bandy about whenever they feel like being assholes. And sure, I do believe there are some men who are genuinely terrified of commitment, but there aren't that many, and for the most part I think it's that they haven't met the right woman yet. Because if a man, no matter how scared he professed to be, met the woman of his dreams, he wouldn't want to let her go, would he? And sure, he might not want to actually get married, but if he were madly in love and risked losing her, he'd do it, wouldn't he?
That's what I think, anyway. — Jane Green

I have a gorgeous office at home but tend not to write there because there are so many distractions. — Jane Green

I no longer think you can live without passion. — Jane Green

All I could see was that the one year I was really primed for holiday cheer, no one else was cooperating. — Jane Green

It's not what you think about that matters in life, it's what you actually do about it. — Jane Green

Melanoma is not the most common of skin cancers, but it is the most dangerous if not found in the early stages. — Jane Green

But the thing is, since I've met someone, everyone started banging on and on about my not-so-secret admirer. I'd started to find it quite exciting. I'd forgotten that I don't get involved because the pain might not be worth it. All that flattery and attention distracted me from any pain that might have been lurking around the corner. But course, the pain got me in the end. It always does. — Jane Green

Marriage should be about fun. It's about friendship, and laughter, and trust, and fun. — Jane Green

When I'm single, I'm this fabulous, independent, confident woman, and then I get involved with one disastrous man after another and I turn into this needy, insecure, fearful girl who becomes frightened of her own shadow. — Jane Green

...don't we all turn into our parents over time? How can we avoid following that pattern as we age? We make choices about how we want to be seen in the world, but as we grow older don't we all forget to hold those constructs up, don't we all start falling into the patterns of our youth? Doesn't our essence always win out? — Jane Green

What I want in a good beach read is sunshine, drama, easy-reading and transportation to another world and other people's problems. — Jane Green

You see what you want to see,
And you hear what you want to hear.
You dig? — Jane Green

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing. — Jane Green

Fantasies are absolutely safe, as long as you never try to make them a reality. — Jane Green

You didn't like him, did you, Dad?"
"It wasn't that I didn't like him," my dad says slowly. "It was just that he lives in a completely different world, and I worried that he didn't really approve of you the way you are, that he was trying to change you into something else."
God, I never realized my dad was that perceptive..
"You see, the thing is," he says after we've both sat for a while in the sunshine, "the thing is that love is really the most important thing. I know it's hard for you to see it now" - he chuckles quietly- "but when I first laid eyes on your mother I thought she was fantastic, and I've never stopped loving her, not for a second. Oh yes, we've had our rough patches, and she can be a bit of an old battle-ax at times, but I still love her. That in-love feeling at the beginning settles down into a different, familiar sort of love, but it has to be there right from the start, otherwise it just won't work. — Jane Green

Loving she realises is a verb. It is an act. It is not enough to say you love someone, and then forget about them, or trust a relationship will stay strong simply because you share a house or children or a life.
Loving requires acts of love. It requires thinking of your spouse, doing things for them to make them happy. It requires acting in loving ways, even when you are tired, or bogged down with work, or so stressed you are waking up every night with a jaw sore from grinding your teeth.
They forgot to do that, she now knows. They forgot to love each other. They expected love to continue, without putting any work into it, and today she knows this is why her marriage failed. — Jane Green

It was everything I had dreamed of, his hands snaking through my hair, my own wrapped around his back, unable to believe I had been given license to touch this boy I had loved for so long, license to hold him, to slip my tongue in his mouth, listen to him sigh with pleasure. — Jane Green

I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn't work out, voice work is what I would choose. — Jane Green

I am beginning to realize, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, that one of the problems I have in life is a tendency to completely romanticize how things will be in the future, which inevitably leads to disappointment because it's pretty much never, never, what I expect — Jane Green

Men haven't changed: they love the thrill of the chase, and if you hand yourself over on a plate they'll lose interest. — Jane Green

Because I'm attractive and sucessful so if I can't get a man I must be failing at something? — Jane Green

I sigh and look at her. 'I must have been mad taking you on as a friend'. ' What are you talking about?' she grins. 'You didn't take me on. I chose you'. — Jane Green

I think friendship is more important than love, but that love that grows out of friendship is the very best of all. — Jane Green

I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world. — Jane Green

Anyone can live in a house, but homes are created with patience, time and love. — Jane Green

As Carrie Fisher once said in a film, everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour. — Jane Green

No!" Sally said. "I didn't want you here in the first place. Why are you here? What do you want from me? Do you want to take my stuff?" She snatched the tiara from her head and cradled it against her chest. "Is that it? You think you can come here and help yourself to my pre- cious jewels? Get out of here! I can't stand you, Grace. 1 never could. Always whining, whining, whining. Why are you here? What do you want from me? You always — Jane Green

It just feels surreal. Every now and then it kind of hits me, but only for a short while, and then it carries on feeling like it didn't really happen, that he's going to walk in this evening and sit in front of the set drinking beer. — Jane Green

Marriage is supposed to be this huge great overwhelming passion, and that we're supposed to be looking for our soulmate, our other half, but it's actually pretty damn mundane. After all the excitement goes, what you really want to be left with is someone who is a really good person and who adores you, and who you can grow old with. I know the bastards are exciting, but they don't make a good husband material. — Jane Green

Shock doesn't hit all at once. I have learned. — Jane Green

She doesn't think, doesn't worry, has no anxiety. She feels no pressure when she is in her garden. She can weed for hours, losing all sense of time until her back starts to hurt and she remembers all the other things she has to do. — Jane Green

When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American. — Jane Green

Sometimes in life, you have to make things happen. That you can change your life if you're willing to let go of the old and actively look for the new. That even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. — Jane Green

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously. — Jane Green

Isn't it funny how sometimes you can instantly connect with people? How, despite being almost strangers, you can feel that you have known someone all your life? — Jane Green

Ten years ago, you wrote a book and you never expected to find out anything about the author. Now with social media, everyone wants that connection. I think our readers want to be invited into our lives and brought on the journey and be part of this whole process. — Jane Green

I treated the first few books as a very long journalistic exercise. I thought of every chapter as an article that needed to be finished. — Jane Green

As far back as I can remember, I have worshipped the sun. My skin is fair, but as the years have gone by, it has toughened and darkened. I now turn a rich golden brown every summer, but only after the first day of burning. — Jane Green

I had always presumed that my first book would be published, but I never dreamt that I would write 15 bestsellers and have this wonderful life in America that I have entirely built for myself. — Jane Green

What he didn't do was control me, or try to mold me into a little wife, some old-fashioned, muted version of who I was. I saw many men do that to many women I knew. They would choose these vibrant, talented, beautiful women, and suck the life and passion and beauty out of them by bullying them into submission. — Jane Green

Taking a risk is always frightening, but I gave myself a set period of time and had enough money to see me through. I operated from the belief that things would be okay, that if I wasn't successful I would find myself a job, but either way, I would be fine. — Jane Green

It's about thinking that being blond & slim & perfect will automatically bring you happiness, & then discovering that life is as full of as many disappointments as there were before. — Jane Green

Other people's behavior is non of my business. — Jane Green

My e-books sales have overtaken everything else, so I think all the marketing has become very much driven by the author now because of social media. — Jane Green

No, really, it's fine, says the woman, getting up to leave. — Jane Green

I have a deep and passionate love of America. It is where I have always thought I would be happiest, and although I miss England desperately, I find that my heart definitely has its home over here. — Jane Green

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong! — Jane Green

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel. — Jane Green

Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways — Jane Green

I want someone who will adore me so much that they cannot even walk past me without touching me in some way. I want someone who will worship me, even when.. I'm sitting around in fluffy slippers with no makeup on and hair scraped back.
I'm sick and tired of being on my own. Most of the time I'm fine. Some of the time I even quite enjoy it. But at this precise moment in time I'm fed up with it. I've had enough.. — Jane Green

For as long as I can remember, I have always had the feeling of not quite fitting in, not being the same as everyone else. — Jane Green

Life is where you look, right? I mean look for the bad, you'll find more of the bad, look for the good, you'll find more of the good. — Jane Green

Alcohol made me beautiful in a way I never felt the rest of the time. — Jane Green

He turned and pulled her in, placed his hands on the sides of her face and gazed into her eyes, his head moving closer and closer
she still couldn't say anything, couldn't think of anything other than his mouth landing on hers. — Jane Green

Marriage should be about fun," she says gently. "It's about friendship, and laughter, and trust, and fun. If it's not fun, if you take it all too seriously, what's the point? You know I've been with Andy for fifteen years, and the reason it still works is because he's my best friend and he still makes me laugh. Admittedly, not all the time, and often we get completely bogged down in work, and the kids, and life, but he's still the person I most want to phone when anything happens in life, and he's still the person who makes me laugh the most. — Jane Green

Good. She is planning lunch on the deck today, is on her way into town via her neighbor's house, where she has spent the last hour or so — Jane Green

in which the soap star talked about her drug bust. "Louise isn't even a bloody — Jane Green

I think relationships are very difficult. It's very easy to get swept away with excitement, glamour, and passion. I think the trick is to look for friendship rather than passion. — Jane Green

I have spent many a night in an Internet chat room, but not since I've been married. — Jane Green

I thought my entire life was coming apart, but I think I just realized that sometimes the thing you think is going to ruin your life is the thing that saves you. — Jane Green

Gabby thinks of all the times she and her friends have discussed people who have been caught having affairs. None of the them have ever understood it. Just because you're married doesn't mean you'll never been attracted to anyone else, Gabby has always said. But the point is that you have a choice, and you should choose to do the right thing; you shouldn't act on your attraction. — Jane Green

Horrible as this is to admit, I think I cried less because my dad was dying than for the dad I had never had. — Jane Green

My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers. — Jane Green

I do what most women do. I meet someone and some of it's right, maybe he looks right, or has the right job, or the right background, and, instead of sitting back and waiting for him to reveal his other bits, I make them up. I decide how he thinks, how he's going to treat me, and, sure enough, every time I conclude that this time he's definitely my perfect man, and all of a sudden, well, not so suddenly perhaps, usually around six months after we've split up, I see that he wasn't the person I thought he was at all. — Jane Green

For me, 'Bookends' marks the start of my foray into commercial fiction, away from what has always been thought of as more traditional chick lit - single girl in the city trips around in Manolos looking for Mr. Right. — Jane Green

My teens and 20s were spent lying on sheets of tinfoil in the weak English sun, covered in baby oil. In Greece and France I would burn, then turn a dark brown. — Jane Green

Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day: The more you write, the easier it becomes. — Jane Green

I show the people I love that I love them by gathering them in my kitchen and feeding them, so no surprise that most of my characters do the same thing. — Jane Green

The fact is that blaming doesn't get you anywhere. It keeps you stuck. Blaming stops you from moving on with your life. — Jane Green

I have learned that it is imperative that I make time for my friends, that they demand to be as much a part of the mix as my family and my work, and perhaps more so, because they are not an inevitability. — Jane Green

Covers, so many covers, so many different, delectable pictures, and although, metaphorically speaking, it is the thing I hate most, when it comes to literature I always judge books by their covers. First the cover will catch my eye, then I read the back of the book, and then finally the first page. — Jane Green

Im used to being adored, but i have no interest in being adored. If you want me to fall in love with you, ignore me, pique my interest by being completely uninterested. — Jane Green

And then there was him, the long and painful love of her life. — Jane Green

Twice a year, I take myself off to a self-imposed 'writer's retreat', staying at a small inn or on a friend's farm, where I am all alone and do nothing other than write. — Jane Green

I had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London. — Jane Green

She always says she doesn't believe women should get married before the age of thirty-five ... she says women change so much in their twenties, they can't possibly know who they are, and the choices they make before the age of thirty are rarely good ones. — Jane Green

Nothing in this world happens without a reason. That we are all exactly where we are supposed to be, and that the pieces of the puzzle have a tendency to come together when you least expect it. — Jane Green

Amazing how spending some money, especially when you haven't got it, can perk you up. — Jane Green