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The Muse

Jessie Burton

Top 10 Best Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“Why are we so trapped by the hours, the minutes of every day? Why can't we live the life that's always out of reach?”

“You really are an artist, aren’t you? You think it’s all about you, and you never stop looking for pain.”

“...Is there ever such a thing as a whole story, or an artist's triumph, a right way to look through the glass? It all depends on where the light falls.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Then the birds flew away, their names turned to kisses, a silence to spell a new world.”

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Book Keywords:

art, youth, writing-process, inspirational, idealism, naivete, creative-process, innocence, creativity

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