Jane Birkin Quotes

My father died in 1989 before I knew what I was going to do with my life. I had just graduated from college. My mother died just before 'Sideways' came out. She knew I was an actor, but she never saw me become successful.

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.

I'm interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things.

My dad passed away when I was 10.

I believe a child dying between a couple either makes you stronger, or it doesn't.

I think to myself, How would things be for me if my dad was still alive? Would we get along? Would we argue? You know, we never got to the falling-out stage with each other.

I never thought there would be a day when I would have to handle things without my father.

My beloved father passed away just two months after I told him I was going to start a company. Whenever I make progress in my career, I wish I could share the news with my father.

'You Should Be Here' came from a real place. I lost my father... it was right when I was getting my record deal. There's just been so many moments that he hasn't been here for. It's kind of the reason I wrote the song.

Some people go through life searching and never find their soul mates. They never do. You and I did, we just happened to have them for a shorter period of time. It's sad, but it's life.

In A Man With a Pipe, my brother observed that although my father had been seen as intellectual and my mother more a creature of temperament, she had often been the more levelheaded of the two. In sum, we miss them as we love them, equally and always.

We are all children until our fathers die.

If you love your dad, it’s tough when he dies. If you don’t like your dad, it’s tough when he dies. Because you lose that guy. Whatever you didn’t get, you miss. And what you did get, you miss.

I write poetry to figure things out. It's what I use as a navigating tool in my life, so when there's something that I just can't understand, I have to "poem" my way through it. For that reason I write a lot about family, because my family confuses me and I'm always trying to figure them out. I write a lot about love, because love is continually confusing in all of its many glorious aspects.

What else is there to write about than love and loss?

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times I stayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that my father worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to come home to a house that felt too big for us.

Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.

I could remember the details as if it had happened yesterday, even though it was hard to believe some of it had happened at all. Funerals were tricky like that. And life, I guess. The important parts you blocked out altogether, but the random, slanted moments haunted you, replaying over and over in your mind.

Well, when Eleanor Roosevelt's mother dies, she goes to live with her Grandmother Hall. And her Grandmother Hall is in mourning. She's in widow's weeds. She's in her 50s, but appears very old. And she's exhausted from raising rather out-of-control children. Her favorite daughter, Anna, has died (Eleanor's mother), and she has living at home two other sons, Vallie and Eddie. And they are incredible sportsmen, incredible drinkers, out-of-control alcoholics.

I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake--especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.

I love women. I actually prefer girls, as a parent, because they disappoint at a different age. They go through that, "Dad's an idiot," which lasted a little longer than I'd like.

Even death has a heart.

You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.