Jill Alexander Essbaum Quotes & Sayings

FACE ONE WEARS as an adult is a mask that's cut to fit in her youth." There are many kinds of masks, Anna thought. Theater masks and Halloween masks and surgical masks and fencing masks and diving masks and wrestling masks and ski masks. Welding visors and face cages, blindfolds and dominos. And death masks. The Doktor continued. "Every mask becomes a death mask when you can no longer put it on or take it off at will. When it conforms to the contours of your psychic face. When you mistake the persona you project for your living soul. When you can no more distinguish between the two. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

I have no knack for volition. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

I've never been nearly as alone as I always say I am — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Bergulme. Elsbeere. Hagebuche. Efeu. Scots elm. Service tree. Hornbeam. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

It is possible to lead several lives at once. In fact, it is impossible not to. Sometimes these lives overlap and interact. It is busy work living them and it requires stamina that a singular life doesn't need. Sometimes these lives live peaceably in the house of the body. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they grouse and bicker and storm upstairs and shout from windows and don't take out the trash. Some other times, these lives, these several lives, each indulge several lives of their own. And those lives, like rabbits or rodents, multiply, make children of themselves. And those child lives birth others. This is when a woman ceases leading her own life. This is when the lives start leading her. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Novelty's a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

I think it's important to let each thing you write teach you how to write it. You must listen to what you do. Let it be in control. I don't step in until I know what it demands of me. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Suggested they try the Glatt, an enormous American-style mall in Wallisellen, one town over from Dietlikon. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Shames the shadow of love she thought — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

What had she learned about verbs? In the past and future tenses, the verb came at the end. And in the present it followed the subject. Wherever she went it tailed her. She dragged it behind like a sack of stones. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action - all action, past and future - comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

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

This season's promotion was a set of knives. Anna saved the stickers - Merkli - but rarely cashed them in. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

But pain is an impatient customer. It wouldn't be long before it demanded attention. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Truth is told when it tells itself. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Four simple chambers.
A thousand complicated doors.
One of them is yours. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

At the Manor on Bahnhofstrasse Anna fought aggressive crowds to pick out a modest twin sweater set that — Jill Alexander Essbaum

A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

There is a correlation between the severity of a person's moods and a lack of self-knowledge. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

There's always a correspondence between one's dreams and one's wounds. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

I am the sum of all my twitches. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

A secret's safest hiding place is in the open. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Anna's spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of The Thorn Birds pulled from her mother's bookshelf. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

And rose from her stool to make a big, bullying point of walking to the scales and weighing them herself. Anna felt scolded and two feet tall. She carried the agitation all the way home and didn't speak another word of German for the rest of the day. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Even the ugliest swan is still more beautiful than the loveliest crown on the fence, Anna thought — Jill Alexander Essbaum

You love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don't feel is apathy. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Analysis isn't pliers, and truth is not teeth: you can't pull it out by force. A mouth stays closes as long as it wants to. Truth is told when it tells itself. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Grief. The first is anticipatory. This is hospice grief. Prognostic grief. This is the grief that comes when you drive your dog to the vet for the very last time. This is the death row inmate's family's grief. See that pain in the distance? It's on its way. This is the grief that it is somewhat possible to prepare for. You finish all business. You come to terms. Goodbyes are said and said again. Anguish stalks the chambers of your heart and you steel yourself for the impending presence of an everlasting absence. This grief is an instrument of torture. It squeezes and pulls and presses down. Grief that follows an immediate loss comes on like a stab wound. This is the second kind of grief. It is a cutting pain and it is always a surprise. You never see it coming. It is a grief that can't be — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Whores, Anna once read, make the very best wives. They are accustomed to the varying moods of men, they keep their broken hearts to themselves, and easy women always ease through grief. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

But there are times to talk to the dead, times when the dead want to talk. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Where you were is never as relevant as where you are. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

It's a travesty when a woman wastes herself. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

Bandaged. The wound is mortal and yet you do not die. That is its own impossible agony. But grief is not simple sadness. Sadness is a feeling that wants nothing more than to be sat with, held, and heard. Grief is a journey. It must be moved through. With a rucksack full of rocks, you hike through a black, pathless forest, brambles about your legs and wolf packs at your heels. The grief that never moves is called complicated grief. It doesn't subside, you do not accept it, and it never - it never - goes to sleep. This is possessive grief. This is delusional grief. This is hysterical grief. Run if you will, this grief is faster. This is the grief that will chase you and beat you. This is the grief that will eat you. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Bored women join clubs and volunteer. Sad women have affairs. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

That it ought to be known I was born this way,
With indiscriminate tendencies. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

No pain ever takes full leave of its person. That pain is greedy and doesn't give ground. That a body remembers what hurts it and how. Old pains get swallowed by new pains. But newer pains always follow suit. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

The Wistful A shirt is for unbuttoning. A name is for forgetting. Drunk is for getting. And hillocks are for sitting on and sighing, when, struck numb by the sun's delinquent shining, you resign to a strychnine indecisiveness that's meant to discredit you. You don't know what to do. Or how. Or who. Or if it even matters, now, to boot. And it suits you absolutely, this languor, this drag. Such as they were, your lusts have been scissored in half. And your heart. That blood-blue slab of vena cava and ventricle, receptacle of kept loves, villain, vile, and trivial - it will take a final beating then throw in its towel. Then brake. Then coast. Then slow to an almost stock-still throb. Then - if you're lucky - it stops. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

The face one wears as an adult is a mask that's cut to fit in her youth. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

We [people] are made separate by the things we do or do not do. Responsibilities of all types curb us. Desire betrays us. No wound is ever truly petty. And there are so many ways to be locked apart from the rest of the world. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

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

A FACE SEEN OUT of context creates confusion. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Anna returned her gaze to the bankers' wives, who huddled into the company of one another. The women were young. Their husbands wore the jewellery of their beauty like elegant wristwatches. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Narcissism isn't vanity, Anna. We're all narcissists to a degree. A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive. You have little regard for those around you. You do what you will with a libertine's abandon. Boredom sets in. A bored woman is a dangerous woman. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

She could go anywhere she wanted. The going wasn't the problem. The problem was belonging where she went. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

He'd taken the boys to the Hallenstadion many times to see the ZSC Lions play. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Some weaknesses beg to be seized. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

Same seeks same; we search out the familiar. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

WHERE DOES FIRE GO when it goes out?" Anna asked. Stephen shook his head. The answer he gave was remote. "Nowhere, Anna. It just goes away. We've been over this before." They had. And Anna still didn't like the answer. Why does the fire ever have to go away? She refused to concede the point. Not when he said it and not - nearly two years later - when she remembered him having said it. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Pain is the proof of life — Jill Alexander Essbaum

The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

One day after class, she dropped her purse outside Bahnhof Oerlikon — Jill Alexander Essbaum

EVERY FEW WEEKS AND SOMETIMES MORE OFTEN THAN THAT, the Benzes would receive in the postbox affixed to the wall outside their front door a notice printed on a half-size sheet of white paper, bordered in a bold black line. They were death announcements. Ein Bestattungsanzeige. The postman delivered them along with the mail whenever a Dietlikon resident died. It was a small-town courtesy, not a typical Swiss practice. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Jung said that beautiful women were sources of terror. That as a general rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment. Anna — Jill Alexander Essbaum

I am beholden to my own peculiar irony: to survive I self-destruct. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

Indulged a pair of affable though persistent Zeugen Jehovas who, each month, arrived on her doorstep with a German-language copy of The Watchtower. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

Events don't always obey rules of time and space. Sometimes the mere thought of a certain friend will cause her to telephone after months of no communication. Or perhaps a man wonders whether he should leave his wife and in the next instant he turns on the radio and hears a notice for apartments. No coincidence is a chance. Synchronicity is the external manifestation of reality. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

I'm cheating on the man I'm cheating on my husband with, Anna thought. I grow less decent every passing day. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

The trouble with mistakes is that they rarely seem like mistakes when they are made. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

The only thing we need to know is this: they bring home a paycheck. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

She bought a pretzel from a vendor and — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Anna was grateful for Ursula - really she was. But Ursula, who was usually never blatantly unkind to Anna, still treated her as a foreign object, a means to the end of her son's happiness (if indeed "happy" was the word for what Bruno was, and Anna was almost sure it wasn't) and the vessel by which her grandchildren - whom she deeply loved - were carried into the world. The help that Ursula offered was for the children's sake, not Anna's. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

As fussy as they were about cleanliness and order, the Swiss seemed to Anna to be rather lax about graffiti. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Grief that finds no relief in tears makes other organs weep. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

And just like that, your big, black lies grow small and white. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell. - JOAN CRAWFORD — Jill Alexander Essbaum

I'm neither plain nor pretty. I'm irrevocably average. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

There are two basic groups of German verbs ... strong and weak. Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow typical rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don't follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on your own terms ... Like people, ... The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are the same. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Let's get you one, Anna."
"A lover?"
Edith rolled her eyes. "No. A fucking houseplant. Yes, a lover." Edith smirked. "It'll cheer you up! — Jill Alexander Essbaum

On another she made chitchat with the cashier at the Coop. That was an absolute first. The checker offered a forced, availing smile in return. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

I do believe that dreams are interpretable. Analysis and praxis have taught me so. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

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

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

Even the loveliest shoulders can bear but so much. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

A cock wants a hole. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

The shadow's potential to destroy is undeniable. Lightning might strike a house and set it ablaze. But harness the electricity and the same house can be illuminated with the turn of a switch. Consider a vaccine. Included in the serum is a small amount of the disease. Light needs the dark. It is the order of the universe. What would thaw in the spring if we didn't have a winter to endure? Consciousness is conditioned against its absence, Jung wrote. Amputate the serpent's tail and the power to heal lies within. Anna — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Synchronicity often masquerades as coincidence. As right-place-right-time-ness. As an and-then-suddenly kind of incident. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Is that not always the case? Given any two people in a relationship, one will always love more, the other less. Right? — Jill Alexander Essbaum

An obsession is a defense against feeling out of control. A compulsion is the failure of that defense. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

For ... if love is not infinite or eternal? Then I want nothing of it. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

I'm suspicious of dreams in books too. Because they're boring and too self-serving. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Sometimes, some of us in some things we do know better. When we know better, I think it's imperative that we do better. Otherwise we're perpetuating myths that have for centuries done us no good. Men and women alike. No one is exempt from being called into consciousness. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

. . . the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Synchronicity is the external manifestation of an inner reality. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

A man can smell a woman's sadness — Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

She thought about Switzerland. Where a smile will give you away as an American. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Anna loved and didn't love sex. Anna needed and didn't need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

When the morning skies grow red And o'er us their radiance shed, Thou, O Lord, appeareth in their light. When the Alps glow bright with splendor, Pray to God, to Him surrender, For you feel and understand, For you feel and understand, That he dwelleth in this land. That he dwelleth in this land. - FIRST VERSE OF THE "SCHWEIZERPSALM," THE SWISS NATIONAL ANTHEM — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Then Anna and Archie took the number 10 tram from Sternen Oerlikon, — Jill Alexander Essbaum