Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.

Along my journey / through this transitory world, / new year's housecleaning.

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

I stood on a tower in the wet, And New Year and Old Year met, And winds were roaring and blowing: And I said, "O years, that meet in tears, Have ye aught that is worth the knowing? Science enough and exploring, Wanderers coming and going, Matter enough for deploring, But aught that is worth the knowing?

When the game is over it is really just beginning.

A new year is a gift from God, a part of the Divine nature of God.

A new year can begin only because the old year ends.

Even though I have so many things to figure out, I'm very much at peace. I don't feel like I'm closing the chapter on this phase of life - I feel like I'm closing the book and starting a new one.

A long December and there's reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.

Even places that have been shrouded in darkness for billions of years can be illuminated. Even a stone from the bottom of a river can be used to produce fire. Our present sufferings, no matter how dark, have certainly not continued for billions of years--nor will they linger forever. The sun will definitely rise. In fact, its ascent has already begun.

In our hearts those of us who know anything worth knowing know that in March a new year begins, and if we plan any new leaves, it will be when the rest of Nature is planning them too.

The first wild-flower of the year is like land after sea.

This is a terrible hour, but it is often that darkest point which precedes the rise of day; that turn of the year when the icy January wind carries over the waste at once the dirge of departing winter, and the prophecy of coming spring.

We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives...not looking for flaws, but for potential.

The summer ends and we wonder who we are And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car And today I passed the high school, the river, the maple tree I passed the farms that made it Through the last days of the century And I knew that I was going to learn again Again, in this less hazy light I saw the fields beyond the fields The fields beyond the field

September is the other January.

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.

I know I can't stay here forever

Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

Time to move on, time to get going. What lies ahead I have no way of knowing. But under my feet, baby, grass is growing.

As we look forward to the New Year, let's resolve to recommit ourselves to the values we share.